Department of French at the University of Virginia
 

Abderrahmane Sissako: a Retrospective
Distinguished Artist in Residence (Nov. 08)

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Abderrahmane Sissako, the internationally-acclaimed Mauritanian/Malian filmmaker, will be a distinguished Artist in Residence in our department for the entire month of November.  Mr. Sissako will visit classes, run workshops and present films to students, faculty and the community at large.
A. Sissako will participate in the Virginia Film Festival and will also be present to discuss his work at four public screenings on grounds in November (Please see poster below)

  • Thursday, November 6, Wilson402, 7pm: Bamako (2006)
  • Thursday, November 13, Wilson402, 7pm: Heremakono/Waiting for Happiness (2002)
  • Thursday, November 20, Wilson402, 7pm: La Vie sur terre/Life on Earth (1998)
  • Monday, November 24, Wilson402, 7pm: Rostov-Luanda (1998)

All films are subtitled in English and translation into English will be provided for any part of the discussion that transpires in French. All screenings are free and open to the public.

Major sponsors of this event: Department of French Language and Literature, Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement.



Bamako (2006, 116min)


Thursday, November 6, Wilson 402, 7pm
Melé is a bar singer, her husband Chaka is out of work and the couple is on the verge of breaking up... In the courtyard of the house they share with other families, a trial court has been set up. African civil society spokesmen have taken proceedings against the World Bank and the IMF whom they blame for Africa's woes... Amidst the pleas and the testimonies, life goes on in the courtyard. Chaka does not seem to be concerned by this novel Africa's desire to fight for its rights... (IMDB)

Heremakono/Waiting for Happiness (2002, 90min)

Thursday, November 13, Wilson 402, 7pm
In Nouadhibou, a lonely and isolated village sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean and the Sahara Desert in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, Abdullah (Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Mohamed), a seventeen-year old boy, arrives from Mali to visit his mother before leaving for Europe. Unable to speak the local Hassanya language and dressed only in Western clothes, he is a stranger in a strange land. The film is Waiting for Happiness, in which Mauritanian director Aderrahmane Sissako portrays the conflict between Western modernization and local African traditions, basing the story on his own experience of exile and return. International Film Critics award for best film in the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes (2002). (IMDB)

La Vie sur terre/Life on Earth (1998, 61min)

Thursday, November 20, Wilson 402, 7pm
In the last days of 1999, after a few shots of a French supermarket, abundant in food and color, we hear Dramane compose a letter home to his father in Mali whom he then visits in the village of Sokolo where he meets the lovely Nana. People place long-distance calls from the post office. "Reaching people," says the postmaster, "is a matter of luck." Contrasts between Paris and Sokolo - between Mali and France and between Africa and Europe - are underscored by voice-over poems and comments by Aimé Césaire. A man dictates a letter to a brother in France: what is the nature of their hardships? People look for their place on this earth. (IMDB | diplomatie.fr)

Rostov-Luanda (1998, 58min)

Monday, November 24, Wilson 402, 7pm
Rostov-Luanda's unobtrusive, languid documentary style disarms you at once. Setting off from his native Mauritania in search of a long-lost classmate from his revolutionary days in Moscow, Sissako begins a quixotic trip to Angola. Armed with just a dated and faded black-and-white class photo, he asks a motley assortment of people all over Angola whether they know where he can find his friend. But the quest to find his old classmate is just a pretext to allow his interviewees to bare their souls about their lives, their histories, their aspirations, troubles, memories in their strife-ridden country. Some are funny, some are sad, many are wistful and all are genuine. Sissako has a gift in finding people with commentary truly riveting in its ordinariness: an elderly Portuguese farming couple, an African schoolboy, a feisty A frican grandmother, a revolutionary intellectual. (IMDB)

For more on Mr. Sissako's visit, please contact Professor Alison Levine at alevine@virginia.edu