Realism, even loosely defined as movies of people doing observable and possible things, is never simple or uniform. One of its richest and most original forms is on view in “Yam Daabo,” from 1987, the first feature by Idrissa Ouédraogo, which has recently come to the Criterion Channel. (It’s also streaming on other platforms and available as a Criterion DVD.) Set mainly in rural Burkina Faso, the director’s homeland, the movie was made in the amateur format of 16-mm. film, with a low budget, a small crew, and a largely nonprofessional cast, including several of the filmmaker’s family members, as befits its family-centered drama: a young woman named Bintou (Aoua Guiraud) and a young man named Issa (Moussa Bologo) want to marry, but another man, Tiga (Rasmané Ouédraogo), aggressively pursues Bintou and threatens Issa’s life. Although the central story is intimate in scale, the film’s scope is large and its social purview deep, and this vast amplitude is a function of Ouédraogo’s way of staging action, or, rather, of envisioning it. Using modest means and methods, “Yam Daabo” (whose title means “The Choice” in the Mooré language) proves to be more than just engaging—it’s exemplary.

The romantic tale, of one kind of choice, is nested in a dramatic frame, of another choice, that’s at once local and international. The movie opens with labor in a drought-stricken village: men feed a flame with bellows, hammering metal into a blade, while other residents wait nearby, baskets in hand. An engine’s growl pierces the calm: a truck approaches, kicking up dust on a long and winding dirt road, and the villagers all rush toward it—all but one man. The truck bears sacks of grain, marked as gifts from the United States, and the villagers press the bearers for their portion. The one who holds back is Bintou’s father, Salam (Ousmane Sawadogo), who makes a choice: rather than depend on outside help, he wants to be self-reliant, and he decides to leave the village in search of more fertile land. He and his family—his wife (Fatimata Ouédraogo), Bintou, and a young son (Madi Sana)—load up a donkey cart and guide it into a parched, sandy plain studded with wizened trees. As they pause during their journey, Issa shows up, having followed them from the village. Reaffirming his love for Bintou, he teams up with the family and helps them traverse the harsh and stony ground. The journey is hampered by lack of money and other misfortunes, and it’s eventually interrupted by a gunshot, announcing the cantankerous presence of Tiga. Issa bitterly but regretfully prepares for the inevitable showdown.

From the start, Ouédraogo emphasizes the arduous struggle of daily subsistence—the preparation of food, the fetching of water in fragile vessels, the tilling of fields. The family sells possessions for cash, purchases supplies to continue onward, hires a driver but can’t afford to be driven the full distance. Still, these many practicalities fuse with the film’s emotional stories of indignant independence and romantic conflict thanks to a sense of analytical observation that is inherently social. For Ouédraogo, personal relationships are inseparable from material demands, and friendly visits involve participation in chores. What’s striking about his vision is that it’s literally visual—and that’s where his ramped-up and reconceived sense of realism displays its startling and thrilling originality.

Though the movie is shot entirely outdoors and largely features people on the move, mostly in the countryside but also in several turbulent city sequences, Ouédraogo (working with three cinematographers) composes images with poise and concentration. Most of the shots, whether with fixed frames or fluid motions, suggest a camera set on a tripod. Although the drama has a quasi-documentary authenticity, the taut images convey a sense of thought along with action, as if the observed events were being discerningly excerpted not only for what they show but for what they imply. The peculiarity of Ouédraogo’s seemingly straightforward and classical practice is to evoke distances, conjuring wide spaces between the images—which is to say, between the characters depicted in them—and to bring those spaces to life. Avoiding documentary-like methods that presume to grasp events in large visual gulps, Ouédraogo offers visual fragments (however ample) that conjure a spectrum of experience that goes beyond what’s onscreen. Those unseen spaces have a kind of electrical charge, the power of bonds and conflicts, of underlying tensions and demands. His technique evokes a social sphere that’s filled with norms and rules, traditions and laws.

It’s a strange trope of modern cinema to film staged fictions with a camera that roves and prowls and reacts impulsively as if it were that of a documentary filmmaker plunged into unplanned and unpredictable situations. In its inspired and original forms, as in Shirley Clarke’s “The Cool World” and many of the Dardenne brothers’ dramas (“Rosetta” being a prime example), the sense of spontaneity and immediacy yields emotional intensity and symbolic resonance. But, like any method, this one risks becoming a mere habit, ossifying into a new convention both visual and thematic. (Visually speaking, I vote for a moratorium on using the Steadicam to follow characters, showing the backs of their heads as they walk.) And, thematically, the overuse of a documentary style for stories about poverty and social conflict makes it seem as if only privileged characters deserve the dignified artifices of an avowedly fictional style. Ouédraogo yielded to neither temptation—and, at the same time, he avoided the familiar tropes of unquestioned classical realism, with its posed groupings, its patterned editing from wider scene-setting to expressive closeups.

One of the marks of “Yam Daabo” is the reliance on point of view, on the shift from objective to subjective standpoints—exactly the sort of conspicuous composition that draws a line between documentary and fiction, as filmmakers, in lieu of observing characters, take their place. The movie’s story covers a long span; it involves death and crime and punishment; it enfolds another romance, between Bintou’s friend (Assita Ouédraogo) and another, long-absent man (Omar Ouédraogo); it involves an unplanned pregnancy and the resulting familial crisis; but it betrays no sense of haste or sketched-out action. In observing the characters as much, in effect, from within as from without—and in intertwining their individual perspectives with the lines of force that surround them—Ouédraogo builds the movie in two directions at once, internal and external, deeply personal yet broad in range. The result is that the dimensions of time are implicitly filled in, as naturally and as richly as the spaces where the action takes place.

Ouédraogo, who died in 2018, at the age of sixty-four, had a plentiful directorial career in both film and television, but one that, after an auspicious start, has been hard to track from the U.S. The films immediately following, which premièred between 1989 and 1992, brought him greater prominence: “Yaaba” (“Grandmother”) is a finely written drama of superstition, adultery, and young love; “Tilaï” (The Law), a grand and tragic historical legend about family honor, won the Grand Prix at Cannes, in 1990; “Samba Traoré,” which won a Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, is a modern moral tale of crime, guilt, and the lure of ill-gotten gains. But since then, as far as I’ve been able to find, none of his subsequent features, through to his final one, “Kato Kato,” from 2006, has had a U.S. release, and few have even made it to film festivals here. (Ouédraogo does, however, make a crucial appearance as an interview subject in Jean-Marie Téno’s documentary “Sacred Places,” from 2009, about movie theatres and the state of filmmaking in Burkina Faso.)

My recent first viewing of “Yam Daabo” proved illuminating not only in terms of appreciating Ouédraogo’s aesthetic but also in terms of highlighting what’s been lacking in some less satisfying movies. Oddly, the one it resonated off most forcefully was Emerald Fennell’s new “Wuthering Heights,” whose image-making I found to be both showy and inadequate to the story’s passions and premises. Alongside “Yam Daabo,” its shots seem like closed-off frames that dispense information and prefabricated moods—that reek of sufficiency and self-sufficiency. By contrast, the images in “Yam Daabo,” though of course conveying information and evoking emotions, do so with a built-in drive toward connectedness. One image needs another, awaits another, builds on another, and the effect isn’t just the telling of a story but the implication of a world. ♦