“Xaraasi Xanne: Crossing Voices” is a profound cinematic experience which manages to captivate aesthetically and to provoke intellectually. By using a rare archive belonging, for the most part, to co-director Bouba Touré (whose role was simultaneously that of worker, activist, and documentarian), the film tells the story of an agricultural cooperative, which West African immigrants, fed up with the humiliations and the underpaid work endured in France, created in Mali in 1977. This improbable return to the motherland is followed in time, from the ecological challenges and political conflicts of 1970s Africa to the present day. Far from being merely a retrospective diagnostic look or simply a critique of industrial and colonial agriculture, the film also demonstrates how agricultural knowledge and the cooperation with French farmers helped locals regain their lands and perhaps even secure food autonomy. In equal measure, it sheds light on a fragment in the history of the fight for immigrant workers’ rights, which continues up to this day. (Sorana Stănescu)