Aya, a young Ivorian woman in her early thirties, says no on her wedding day, to everyone’s astonishment. After emigrating to Asia, she works in a tea export shop with Cai, a 45-year-old Chinese man. Aya and Cai fall in love but can their affair survive the turmoil of their past and other...
Just outside of the Malian city of Timbuktu, now occupied by militant Islamic rebels who impose the Sharia on civilians and inconvenience their daily life, a cattleman kills a fisherman.
8 shorts centered around 8 themes directed by 8 famous film directors involved and sharing their opinion on progress, on the set-backs and the challenges our planet faces today.
Two boys (Tamir & Amine) awake one morning to find that their father has abandoned their family. Shocked, they begin to misbehave. While surreptitiously watching a movie, they think they see their father speaking to them and steal the film to examine the frames. Their mother (Achta) eventually...
Before immigrating to the West, Abdallah travels to the coastal city of Nouadhibou, Mauritania, to visit his mother. Although he grew up there, Abdallah feels anything but at home in his old neighborhood: he can no longer speak the local dialect and he wears western clothes that immediately cast...
Caught in the stranglehold of debt and structural adjustment, Africa is fighting for its survival. In the face of disaster, representatives of African society bring an action against international financial institutions. The trial takes place in Bamako, in the yard of a house, among its inhabitants.
Just before the turn of the 21st century, Dramane, a Malian who lives in Paris, returns to his family's African village to visit his father. After biking around the town, Dramane realizes how different and stagnated his village is compared to the ever-changing modern world, especially at the dawn...
Chad, 2006. After a forty-year civil war, the radio announces the government has just amnestied the war criminals. Outraged by the news, Gumar Abatcha orders his grandson Atim, a sixteen-year-old youth, to trace the man who killed his father and to execute him. Atim obeys him and, armed with his...
Ahmed’s father has only a day with his wife and son before he must return to war. With haunting, innocent cruelty, the children play games that mirror the adult world, leading them to discover the harshness of destiny
To be somewhere precise yet stand nowhere at all, to embody one’s convictions, yet never miss the essential, to rise up and be present at the critical moment, to bear witness to a world waiting to tell itself and be retold, to come and go, both at once, abandoning reckless speed, but rather...
This film explores the impact of the modern world on the traditional male society of the Maghreb. It is a film about men who prefer to live life as an abstract game and the free-spirited woman who changes everything. Said and Youssef have fulfilled a life-long dream by opening a "chess bar" in the...
Sissako visits a war-torn Angola after thirty years of war in search of a friend and thereby through interviews reflects on the lost utopias of a generation of Africans who experienced the liberation struggles. His camera is witness to the dislocation and despair of those he encounters living in...
Al Zubarah tells the story of life in the old coastal city of Al Zubarah, one of Qatar’s most significant historical sites. From the break of dawn and the echo of morning prayer, the director, Abderrahmane Sissako travels with his audience through the alleys of the old city, into mosques,...
Shot in glimmering black-and-white reminiscent of classic silver-nitrate cinema, Sissako's 9-minute film was photographed over the course of seven days in March 2017 in Rawda Al Ghadriat, in the Northern Desert of Qatar, and features members of the Bedouin Al Naemi family, who provided some of the...
