In the late 1990s, French television Arte created a series on the millennium with films shot all over the world, and Abderrahmane Sissako’s entry—Life on Earth—featured Africa. Starting from the packaged excess of European consumption in a basement department store in Paris, the film ascends into the light of Sokolo, a rice-growing village in Mali and home to Sissako’s father. This gorgeous essay about the connections and disconnects between Africa and Europe shows the village’s genuine beauty and contemporaneity without sentimentalizing poverty and suffering, as the boundary between fiction and documentary seems to disappear.(1998, in French and Bambara with English subtitles, 61 minutes).

After a decade of film school in Russia, Mauritanian director Sissako brought his first feature, October, directly to the Cannes Film Festival. An African student must leave the Soviet Union and say goodbye to his Russian girlfriend, who must deal with the serious questions he has left behind. (1993, in Russian with English subtitles, 37 minutes).

This screening is introduced by Abderrahmane Sissako followed by a post-screening discussion with Linda Mokdad, St. Olaf College.

A teenage boy, likely a future filmmaker, visits his mother in Mauritania on his way to Europe. As in his previous films, Abderrahmane Sissako moves us with exquisite imagery rather than with narrative drive. Although Waiting for Happiness never leaves Africa, its treatment of migration and diaspora is more profound than that of many “immigration” films. Focusing on slow but crucial processes such as learning a language or practicing a musical instrument, the film meditates beautifully on its subjects with captivating light and framing, and masterly filmmaking.

This screening is introduced by Abderrahmane Sissako followed by a post-screening discussion with Cherif Keita, Carleton College.

Bamako puts the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank on trial for the damage they have done to Africa, with a cast that includes real-life judges and lawyers set in a large family courtyard in Mali’s capital city. The film is extraordinary for its moving portrayal of ways that Malians living in and around the compound have been affected by the financial policies under debate.

This screening is introduced by Abderrahmane Sissako followed by a post-screening discussion with Joëlle Vitiello, Macalester College.

Nominated for Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and winner of 7 Césars,  Abderrahmane Sissako's latest is a brilliant portrait of a place ruled by religion and a people traumatised by division. It is based on factual events of the brief 2012 occupation of the legendary city by religious fundamentalists. The film focuses on the humanistic effects of the conflict on the townspeople. The familiar woes of everyday life and remarkable resistance to a hostile takeover encircle a narrative that follows a herder and his family residing on the outskirts of town. Universal truths of human nature emerge as he experiences an upturned idea of justice following a dispute over his slaughtered prize cow.

This screening is introduced by Abderrahmane Sissako followed by post-screening discussion with Charles Sugnet, University of Minnesota.

Winner of the 2002 Cannes International Critics Award, this film traces the intersecting lives of the inhabitants of a coastal town, situated where the Sahara Desert meets the Atlantic Ocean. Among them: Abdallah, an urbane, Paris-educated student home for a visit and, Khatra, the young, curious apprentice to a local electrician. Poised on the cusp of the continent, these characters embody a world of exile and adaptation to external forces and local graces.

Oscar nominated for Best Foreign Language Film and winner of 7 Césars including Best film and Best Director!

Abderrahmane Sissako's latest is a brilliant portrait of a place ruled by religion and a people traumatised by division. It is a portrait of the country of his childhood, the west African state of Mali, and in particular the city of Timbuktu, whose rich and humane traditions are being trampled by fanatical jihadis, often from outside the country. The story revolves around the death of a cow, affectionately named "GPS" – an appropriate symbol for a country that has lost its way.

Director Abderrahmane Sissako is scheduled to be present.

This program presents all of Sissako’s short films. Among them: October (1993), on the relationship of an African student studying in Moscow and his Russian girlfriend on the eve of his departure; Tiya’s Dream (2008), one of eight shorts on the Millennium Development Goals, follows a young Ethiopian school girl with a rich imagination and an ailing father; and Sabriya (1997), shot in the desert landscape of southern Tunisia, looks at two chess-crazed brothers who own a café but are driven apart when one falls in love.

Abderrahmane Sissako (b. 1961, Kiffa, Mauritania) was raised in his father's homeland of Mali before going back to Mauritania in 1980. A scholarship to study Russian literature enabled him to attend the Institute of the University of Moscow and later to enroll in Moscow's Institute for Cinema (VGIK), where he studied from 1983 to 1989. He settled in France in the 1990’s to pursue filmmaking in a complex philosophical style that combines personal essay, autobiography, allegory, and drama to explore identity, displacement, and the cultural and economic effects of colonialism in contemporary Africa. He is, along with Ousmane Sembène, Souleymane Cissé, Idrissa Ouedraogo and Djibril Diop Mambety, one of the few filmmakers from Sub-Saharan Africa to be considered one of the world’s leading filmmakers. His lastest film Timbuktu was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or in the main competition section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, won 7 Césars at the 2015 national film award of France and was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2015 Academy Awards.