But the idea became less of a joke as Kirkley got involved in the music scene in the Sahel, a semi-arid region stretching from Senegal in the west to Eritrea in the east. In 2009, Kirkley founded the blog-cum-record label Sahel Sounds and began collecting popular songs that people were trading through cell phone SIM cards and Bluetooth connections. He reissued the songs as part of an album series called Music From Saharan Cellphones. A Tuareg Purple Rain, he believed, could further promote the regional music scene.

“I liked the concept of a film that is a vehicle for an artist, utilizing elements from the artist's life to create a fictional, music-based film” Kirkley said, citing The Harder They Come, the Jamaican crime film that helped introduce the world to Jimmy Cliff as another example.

Akounak, which Kirkley claims is the world's first Tuareg-language fiction film, also has a secondary aim: entertaining Tuareg audiences and inspiring Tamashek-speaking filmmakers. According to Kirkley, the film industry in the Sahel is currently dominated by foreign imports, particularly Hausa-language films from Nigeria.

Akounak is a departure from documentaries about the Sahel and its music scene, which tend to focus on the turbulent political history of the Tuareg guitar style known as ishumar (a term derived from the French word chômeur, meaning "unemployed"). This “desert blues” guitar style, popularized internationally by Mali’s Tinariwen, is often discussed in the context of the marginalized youth groups that turned to armed rebellion during the Sahel's early post-colonial period.

While rebel militias and military coups are historical components of Tuareg music, Kirkley also wanted to convey what life is like for contemporary desert-blues musicians. Musicians are shown at work: performing at weddings, traveling across vast swathes of desert terrain, and recording songs on portable phones in a country where most citizens don't have access to computers.

Kirkley's approach to the film was informed, in part, by Italian neorealist directors and the French filmmaker Jean Rouch, and structured around quotidian routines and objects. Quoting a friend, Kirkley said his film is not “about Kalashnikovs, but cellphones, motorcycles, and guitars.”

Chrisopther Kirkley/Vimeo

One of the first challenges Kirkley confronted was finding a star who could carry the film—someone who had both the musical skills and the on-stage charisma to measure up to Purple Rain's original star.

“There are loads of Tuareg guitarists, but a lot of guitarists don't write their own songs, and we needed a real musician, a parallel to Prince," he explained.

While collecting songs in northern Mali, in the years before Islamist militants banned secular music in the region, Kirkley came across a couple of strange, auto-tuned folk songs, one called “Tahoultine” and another called “Anar.” Kirkley was so struck by the songs that he traveled to Niger to find the man who made them, Mdou Moctar. After connecting with the guitarist, the pair spent two weeks recording a raw-edged live album called Afelan. Kirkley had found his star.