Blame my Eurocentric art-film education. Until recent viewings of his vibrant work, I was totally unfamiliar with the cinema of Gaston Kaboré, the Burkina Faso filmmaker who’s enjoying a well-deserved retrospective this week at the Harvard Film Archive. Kaboré, who grew up in the capital city of Ouagadougou and did postgraduate work at the Sorbonne, is this year’s winner of the sixth Genevieve McMillan and Reba Stewart Fellowship for Distinguished Filmmaking. He’ll be here to introduce screenings on Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday.

"My father taught me a lot of things," Kaboré said in a 1984 Liberation interview. "In spite of the fact that he had left his village at the age of ten . . . , he kept an intimate relationship with his native environment, which he transmitted to me. For instance, he has always been closely attached to land."

So has Kaboré. His utopian folk tales, all set in an unnamed bush village 30 kilometers from Ouagadougou, chronicle the native people (of the Mossi ethnic group, they speak in the Mòoré language) who have made homes there for centuries, and he celebrates their civility, their respect for the elderly, their communal conscience, their symbiotic relationship with animal and vegetable life and with the earth. These films share the same yellow-grass topography, the same arid terrain, semi-amateur actors mixed in with real villagers doing their business: goat herding, whittling, selling wares in the market.

As Kaboré shows it, the ebb and flow between the sexes is mostly egalitarian; and because his own vantage is so non-sexist, he spends quality time with women who are joky and chummy and often pregnant. Kaboré’s shooting style? Leisurely takes, medium and long shots, a very occasional close-up. He discovered cinema, he’s explained, through Senegal’s Ousmane Sembene, not through plot-driven Hollywood. Scenes with protagonists are given no more weight than anecdotal sequences with unidentified villagers.

Kaboré has two kinds of films: (a) mythic ones set in pre-colonial times, before the arrival of the white man, in which the Mossi people see themselves, and their (oral) history, as the center of the universe; and (b) satiric ones set in today’s post-colonialist world, in which the upwardly mobile populace has taken on the worst trappings of its former overseers, the French.

Wend Kuuni (1982; October 25 at 7 p.m. and October 26 at 9 p.m.) is an early mythic work about a foundling boy (Serge Yanogo) discovered unconscious in the bush and brought by the man who finds him to reside among the hospitable Mossi people. The entrails of Moses and Oedipus? A mute, he’s called "Wend Kuuni" ("God’s gift"), though one traumatic day, he regains speech and also the memory of his mother lying dead in the wilderness, and of a somewhere lost father. Playing with Wend Kuuni is an ecological short, "Un arbre appelé Karité" (1993), a hymn to a tree that supplies food, medicine, even cosmetics.

Rabi (1992; October 26 at 7 p.m.), also pre-colonialist, is a universal story about children, parents, and pets. Twelve-year-old Rabi (Yacouba Kaboré) adopts a tortoise that his father has brought home. He spends so much time with the creature that his annoyed dad throws it back into the bush. Rabi cries and cries, until an old man takes him to find his own tortoise. Rabi returns triumphant with a humongous one. Of course, there’s a lesson to be grasped: Rabi must learn that tortoises should be set free.

Buud Yam (1997; October 27 at 7 p.m. and October 30 at 9 p.m.), Kaboré’s newest feature film, is a 14-years-later sequel to Wend Kuuni, with the same actor, Serge Yanogo, brought back in the lead. Once more, there are echoes of Oedipus: Wend Kuuni’s village is overcome with pestilence and death, and his adopted sister has sunk into a perhaps fatal depression. Is Wend Kuuni somehow causing all this? Mounting a chestnut stallion, he departs on a Lord of the Rings–like journey in search of a mysterious healer, and also his missing father. Kaboré’s camera ventures out where it’s never been before, including into a desert of camel-riding people out of The Arabian Nights.

The post-colonialist movies? Zan Boko (1988; October 25 at 9 p.m. and October 29 at 9:15 p.m.), a semi-comedy, finds a French-speaking yuppie African family buying up land smack in the middle of our perennial village and building there a hotel-sized estate that dwarfs the bush people who live just outside its gates. And "Roger, le fonctionnaire" (1993) and "Chronique d’un échec annoncé" (1993), both playing with Rabi, are two versions of the same sad story: an honest, hard-working bureaucrat falls afoul of incompetent and dishonest government employees in today’s hip, with-it, Francophile Ouagadougou.