Yaaba
- measured
- tender
- intimate
Neutral, measured, gentle drama, grounded in texture. Ambivalent, intimate, tender, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →A small African village. The story focuses on Bila, a ten year old boy who befriends an old woman, Sana. Everybody calls her 'Witch' but Bila himself calls her 'Yaaba' (grandmother). When Bila's cousin Nopoko gets sick it is Sana's medicine that saves her.
Our read · Yaaba (1989) reads as a neutral, measured, grounded drama entry — gentle in intensity, intimate in scope, tender in temperature, ambivalent in outlook, with a strong directorial signature. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.
More info & search links
The shape of Yaaba
What watching it is actually like.
“You want a gentle African village tale of a boy befriending the ostracized old 'witch' who saves his cousin.”
Skip it tonight — You want fast plots or dislike slow rural slice-of-life.
The reading.
Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
Discussion
What does your Movie DNA look like?
Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.
Calibrate yourself