Abderrahmane Sissako

Abderrahmane Sissako is a film director and screenwriter. After spending his childhood in Mauritania and Mali, he moved to Moscow to study film studies. It was there that he made his first film, Octobre (1993), which was enthusiastically received at Cannes. Sissako is currently the most influential filmmaker of African descent. In his work, he confronts an international audience with its indifference towards the ‘forgotten continent’ and powerfully depicts the consequences of the African diaspora and human rights abuses in Africa. His impressive film Timbuktu (2014), which explores how fundamentalists have taken control of an African city and the various ways in which the population copes with this, won seven Césars and was nominated for the Palme d’Or and the Oscar for Best International Feature Film. Black Tea premiered in 2024. Alongside his work as a director, Sissako is committed to nature conservation in his country: as part of the Great Green Wall project, he and his wife, Kessen Tall, look after a plot of land near the border with Senegal.