When a film by an African filmmaker sneaks into the official section of a major festival, it is talked about as an event, a rarity. This is because it is really very unusual for competitions like Cannes or Venice to set their sights on cinema made in Africa. If the flute sounds, it is generally because there is French money in the form of co-production. It is true that it is not produced as much as in Europe or the United States, but there are directors who have succeeded in telling their story. Their perspectives always have something different, a perspective that has not been educated in colonialism or paternalism. There is a difference in the way they represent bodies and relationships.
While it is true that African cinema has few well-known representatives, it is also true that Abderrahmane Sissako stands above them, who was also a juror at the last Venice Festival which crowned Pedro Almodóvar with the Golden Lion for The next piece. Sissako dazzled in 2006 with Bamako, presented out of competition at Cannes and which showed the courtyard of a house in the town that gives its name to the film, where a courtroom had been set up in which spokespeople for African civil society accused the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund of the ills that have befallen a devastated Africa.
His most famous film came out nine years later, Timbuktu (2015), for which he was even nominated for the Oscar for best international film representing Mauritania, competed for the Palme d’Or and surprised by sweeping the Césars of French cinema since it also won the awards for best film, direction and screenplay, along with four other trophies.
Since then, Sissako has not released a new film. Their projects are simmering, and this is how the story that gave birth to black tea, the long-awaited film that is already in Spanish cinemas. Once again, it tells a story that is little known to Western viewers, that of the many Africans who have made a sort of exodus to China. The story is represented by Aya, a young Ivorian woman who, after saying no on her wedding day in her country, emigrates to this Asian country, where she finds a job in a tea room.
The film is a love story, but also a look at how we are all migrants. On this occasion, Sissako focused on Africans who traveled to Asia, something that cinema is not used to telling. Sissako found the germ of his story in a restaurant called La Colline Parfumée, run by a couple where he was Asian and she was African. There he meets this African exodus to the city of Guangzhou, which has generated a large black community and fostered a multiculturalism that the film embellishes with its images.
With his stories, he also tries to open up the spectrum of what is told about Africa, because he believes that little cinema is made on his continent and that when it is finally produced, “it is reduced to migratory dramas, to economic problems, to the people “poor man who travels”. He “wanted to show a beautiful Africa”. “Here is a woman like Aya who leaves, who is curious about the other. I feel very happy to be able to tell this”, explains the filmmaker.
For Europe, it seems that wars ended with World War II, because it no longer suffers this violence, but this is not the case. There is violence and massacres on other continents.
Abderrahmane Sissako
— Director
There is in his films a dignity of the person who emigrates, because he believes that in them “there is always a journey of curiosity.” “Africans who come to Spain from different countries and who come from different countries want to learn Spanish immediately. Those who go to China learn Chinese. There is a search for the universal that, in my opinion, is really a fundamental search,” he says and believes that there is not the same interest in the opposite direction, towards the knowledge of Africa.
“The world is big because it is made up of diverse identities and each identity is rich. If we are interested in them, we will create a less frightening world. This fear that there is now towards the other, towards the “foreigner”. If we really care about them, we will consider them less dangerous. If we forget the color of their skin, if we say to ourselves that this guy in front of me, who speaks my language, with mistakes, but my language, and maybe even four other languages of his continent, comes to give us more richness… It is important that the identity of the man who travels is respected,” he says forcefully.
For now, he is not optimistic about this reality and believes that the West has no desire to change its perspective: “Europe has never really been interested in Africa, and that remains the same. There is only an economic interest, exploitation. There has always been, as Spain had and has always done in Latin America, a superiority complex. As long as this superiority exists, a real interest in a culture can never arise.
A vision in which the white and European man is always at the center, something that Sissako notices in his little interest in the war conflicts that exist if they do not directly affect them. “For Europe, it seems that wars ended with the Second World War, because it no longer suffers that violence, but that is not the case. There is violence and massacres on other continents. We are unable to achieve peace in the Middle East. We suffer daily violence and therefore we need a real restart if we want to create a future for our children and grandchildren. Leave them a better world, without violence. But in reality it is almost a utopia,” he says with a certain pessimism. This is why his cinema seems increasingly necessary, because it is clear that he must remain “faithful to the same objective, to talk about Africa as it really exists and in relation to the rest of the world.”
