[1] The Malian film critic Manthia Diawara welcomed the film, which deals with arranged marriage and female genital mutilation, as "an impassioned cry for the emancipation of African women [...] one of the boldest examples of socially engaged filmmaking to come out of Africa in recent years".
[2] The film opens with a shot of a mother goat nursing her kids, before cutting to a page of statistics from the World Conference on Women, 1980: A world profile on the condition of women reveals the striking effects of double oppression.
[3]The main character in Finzan is a widow, Nanyuma, expected by tradition to marry her brother-in-law, Bala.
Though forced to undergo the marriage ceremony, she refuses to consummate it, and eventually leaves the village to make her own future.
In one of the film's final scenes, she Fili is captured by a group of women and forcibly excised.