Oscar nominee Abderrahmane Sissako (“Timbuktu”) returns to the screen for the first time in nearly a decade with his latest feature, “Black Tea,” a lushly lensed romantic drama about a love spanning cultural divides that world premieres Feb. 21 in competition at the Berlin Film Festival.
It has been almost 10 years since the release of Sissako’s last film, “Timbuktu,” which was set during the jihadist takeover of northern Mali in 2012 and was described by PvNew’s Jay Weissberg as a “stunningly shot condemnation of intolerance and its annihilation of diversity.” The film, a resounding critical success, competed for the Palme d’Or in Cannes, swept France’s Cesar Awards and was nominated for an Oscar in 2015 in what was then the best foreign language film category.
“Black Tea” finds Sissako working in a more gentle, melancholy tone. The film follows Aya, played by Nina Mélo, who walks out on her wedding day in Ivory Coast and sets off to start a new life in China. Amid the African hair salons and cluttered market stalls of the Guangzhou district known as “Chocolate City,” she finds work in a tea shop owned by Cai (Han Chang), who initiates her into the traditional Chinese tea ceremony. Gradually, a romantic bond develops between the two.
Much like their slowly simmering love affair, Sissako says “Black Tea” has been brewing since long before the movie’s script was written. The first seeds, in fact, were planted in the director’s 2002 breakout “Heremakono” (Waiting for Happiness), an elusive, contemplative film set in a small West African seaside village. In a memorable scene from that film, which won the FIPRESCI award after premiering in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, a Chinese merchant dines with his African girlfriend before launching into a karaoke set.
It was a small snapshot of greater changes that were taking shape across the continent, foreshadowing China’s growing influence in Africa and highlighting how globalization would not only upend trade and geopolitics, but the ways in which cultures intermingle. For Sissako, it was a glimpse of the world to come, and a reminder of how “this kind of globalization also brings people together,” he says.
Set in Guangzhou — though lensed in Taiwan, because of the difficulty of shooting in China — “Black Tea” unfolds among the African diaspora who have flocked to the cosmopolitan boomtown, a bustling port city where African barbers bicker in Cantonese over the strains of Afrobeat music, and a young Ivorian woman experiences the sort of freedom she couldn’t feel in the suffocating society that she fled, constrained by the expectations of others.
It is that dizzying sensation of possibility, says the director, that defines the immigrant’s journey more than passports and borders. “For me, immigration is not a question of geography. It’s more the question of what you feel before you leave a place,” says Sissako. “That is the real immigration. The dream to do something — to be free to dream.”
From his early days as a director, Sissako has been preoccupied with questions of cultural identity, alienation and displacement, reflecting the 62-year-old filmmaker’s lived experience. Born in Mauritania, he was raised in his father’s homeland, Mali, before emigrating to the Soviet Union to study at Moscow’s venerable VGIK film school and later settling in France. It was while living in Paris that his career as a filmmaker began, though he returned time and again to Africa in the years that followed to make movies including “Life on Earth” (1998), “Waiting for Happiness” and “Bamako” (2006), a scathing indictment of the West’s post-colonial hangover in Africa that premiered out of competition in Cannes.
Twelve years ago, Sissako returned to Mauritania and his native West Africa, which has proven fertile ground for the director’s imagination. Even now, however, he expresses ambivalence about the idea of belonging — in Africa, or anywhere else.
“I come from there accidentally. I could come from any other place,” says Sissako. If the director has felt rooted anywhere across his three decades as a filmmaker, it is to the landscape of cinema. “I really feel my identity is to understand — not to judge — but to understand and try to explain.”
