Films with: Sissako, Abderrahmane

Daratt Dry season /

Daratt: The government of Chad granted amnesty to war criminals in 2006, following forty years of civil strife. Atim, age 16, is given a revolver by his grandfather so that he may find and kill the man who killed his father. Atim quickly locates Nassara, now married and living as a baker in a nearby village. Pretending to be looking for work, Atim is hired as an apprentice baker. Despite his disgust, Atim gradually recognizes the father figure he has always needed. Nassara sees the teenager as a potential son and one day proposes adoption. L'arche du desert : A Romeo and Juliet story of two young lovers whose families are bitter rivals, and who seek refuge in a cave amid extremist political violence.

DVD 7726

Heremakano En attendant le bonheur /

Depicts life in the seaside town of Nouadhibou in Mauritania. A young man, Abdallah visits the town, where his mother lives, before emigrating to Europe. He feels disconnected from his people because he dresses in Western clothes, and he does not speak the language, but he connects in small ways during his stay.

DVD 4535

Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project.

Touki bouki: "A vivid, fractured portrait of Senegal in the early 1970s. ... two young lovers long to leave Dakar for the glamour and comforts of France, but their escape plan is beset by complications both concrete and mystical"--Container. Redes: "In this vivid, documentary-like dramatization of the daily grind of men struggling to make a living by fishing on the Gulf of Mexico (mostly played by real-life fishermen), one worker's terrible loss instigates a political awakening among him and his fellow laborers"--Container.

DVD 10499

Timbuktu

A cattle herder and his family who reside in the dunes of Timbuktu find their quiet lives, which are typically free of the Jihadists determined to control their faith, abruptly disturbed when they are forced to follow the new laws of their foreign occupants.

DVD 11163

Vie sur terre Life on earth /

A film about the significance of the start of the 21st Century for people still struggling to enter the 20th. Abderrahmane Sissako's solution was to improvise a 'fictional documentary' out of daily life in Sokolo, his father's village in Mali near the southeastern corner of Mauritania. He then overlaid these vignettes with readings from Aimé Césaire ... Behind all of this, he weaves the melancholy tones ["Folon"] of the great Malian tenor, Salif Keita and music by other artists.

DVD 1966