Life On Earth with Abderrahmane Sissako
Saturday, 10:00 am, Regal Downtown #4
Director: Abderrahmane Sissako
Writer: Abderrahmane Sissako
Cinematographer: Jacques Besse
Cast: Abderrahmane Sissako, Nana Baby, Mohamed Sissako
Running Time: 61 min
Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako was born in 1961 in Kiffa, Mauritania. He spent his childhood in Africa and studied at the Moscow Film Academy before moving to Paris. Commissioned by French/Swiss television station La Sept Arte as part of its L’An 2000 Par Vue… series, Sissako returned to his father’s village of Sokolo to create a portrait of Africa at the coming of the new millennium. Pulsating with the portrayal of the life and colorful characters that eke out a living on this dusty terrain, Life on Earth is a meditation on the significance of the coming of the 21st century for people still struggling to enter the 20th.
Despite its isolation, Sokolo maintains rusty contact with the European world. Radio France reports on the millennium with its own brand of perky but superficial universalism. In contrast, the antiquated local radio station offers alternative coverage, readings from Aimé Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialism. “Europe has fed us lies,” Césaire says, “for it is not true that Man’s work is done.”
The New York Times raves that director Sissako “gives heft and breadth to home in all of his films by using silences and pauses so eloquently that the chatter other filmmakers use to fill screen time seems empty and meaningless.”
Sissako’s short film Sabriya also explores the collision of modernity with antiquity, this time in the Maghreb. It is the story of two men, Said and Youssef, who are living out their childhood dream of opening a chess bar in the middle of the desert. Their life of casual poetry is abruptly interrupted by the arrival of Sarah, a sexually liberated, uninhibited woman, who turns their existence upside down.
