Abderrahmane Sissako: the vanguard of African cinema

Of the (scandalously) few African filmmakers who have found international acclaim, Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako is the best known today.

Since rising to prominence in 2002, his films – addressing globalisation, identity politics and now, most controversially, Islamic radicalism – have offered serious narratives about the realities facing Africa, told through searingly beautiful images.

His films have been Cannes hits and his most recent, Timbuktu became a much-lauded contender for best foreign film at this year’s Oscars.

Lessons from the Soviet Union

Born in 1961 in Mauritania, Sissako lived most of his life in Mali before travelling to Moscow to study at the Federal State Film Institute, between 1983 and 1989.

A filmmaking education he shares with the father of African cinema: Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene, Moscow offered support and training to west Africa’s students where its former colonial ruler France was reluctant.

For the students of the newly independent west African countries Russia extended a hand of “Soviet friendship” through cultural exchange, education and training. They were hoping to coax countries onto the course of communism as they negotiated new political landscapes.

The two short films that Sissako made reflecting on his time abroad are remarkable because they address, head on, the new political currents of the time.

In October (1993) and the documentary Rostov-Luanda (1998) Sissako explores the relationships African countries forged with the world beyond those with its former colonisers.

October, shot in 1993, is a dark and near-silent black-and-white film that tells the story of Idrissa, an African student, and Irina, his Russian girlfriend, and the difficulties of forming a relationship across the racial and cultural divides of the 1980s, between Mali and Moscow.

The film also shows Sissako’s reverence for the great Russian filmmakers. In one scene October makes a direct reference to Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic Andrei Rublev (1966): Irina pricks her finger on a rose Idrissa gives her, and a single colour shot jumps out, the red of the blood a shock in the otherwise sombre film.

Africa takes on the World Bank

After Waiting for Happiness launched him onto the world stage in 2002 – he won the Foreign Cineaste of the Year and the Fipresci film critics’ prize at Cannes – Sissako turned his lens back to Mali and to his own family courtyard in the country’s capital.

Bamako, released in 2007 – the year that Sembene died, was met with critical acclaim and Sissako was declared at the vanguard of African cinema, building on Sembene’s political, realist brand of filmmaking and taking it to new audiences.

Set in an outdoor courtroom in a mud-walled compound, the Malian people are plaintiffs who accuse the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) of harming their economy.

Part-improvised, part-scripted, it’s an attempt to give Africans their day in court – an act of symbolic justice against the forces of globalisation and neocolonialism that have ravaged the continent.

“It’s obviously an improbable scenario: to put on trial these two institutions that nobody can hold accountable. But that’s the point. In this little courtyard we make the impossible possible,” Sissako said of the film.

Daring to humanise jihadists

“If you look at the different stories, there are different blocks, you can move them around, put them in different places. And for me, that’s what cinema is.”

If there’s a style or approach that links Sissako’s films, it’s his fragmentary storytelling, which allows him to broach difficult, dense and complex subjects without attempting to draw grand conclusions.

Timbuktu, released in the UK on Friday, follows this approach, interweaving the stories of residents of the ancient Malian city – in recent years wracked by violence and Islamic fundamentalism – he builds a portrait of daily life full of empathy and humanity.

Released in a climate of fear and sensational headlines following the Charlie Hebdo shootings, Isis’s ongoing murderous rampage and Boko Haram’s brutality in northern Nigeria, Sissako’s piecemeal narrative offers a different perspective on the lives of people reported in the news.

It was called “the film that dares to humanise jihadists”.

Sissako told the New York Times: “To portray a jihadist as simply a bad guy, who does not in any way resemble me, who’s completely different, that’s not completely true.” The jihadist is, he says, is “a fragile being. And fragility is an element that can make anybody tip over into horror.”

This fragility spills over into his storytelling, leaving the subject of religion and violent fundamentalism open to interpretation, and crucially, to discussion.

This article originally appeared on the BFI website