The Global Griot : Sissako's Cinematic Journey
Waiting for Happiness / Heremakono
Abderrahmane Sissako
Director's bio
Abderrahmane Sissako
Abderrahmane Sissako (born Oct 13, 1961, Kiffa, Mauritania) … Selected filmography: Life on Earth (1998), Waiting for Happiness (2002), Bamako (2006), Timbuktu (2014), Black Tea (2024). Career highlights include Cannes Un Certain Regard selection and FIPRESCI Prize for Waiting for Happiness and an Oscar nomination for Timbuktu.
Synopsis
In Nouadhibou, a Mauritanian coastal town, Abdallah returns to visit his mother before emigrating. He’s adrift—alienated from language and customs—while a boy, Khatra, apprentices with an aging electrician, Maata, whose craft is both livelihood and metaphor for fragile connections. Sissako structures the film as an impressionistic mosaic: brief encounters at doorways and shorelines, stalled repairs, songs and lullabies, border checks and farewells. The drama resides in the textures of waiting—what it means to pause at the threshold of departure, to feel home recede even while standing in its streets. Without overt narrative scaffolding, the film’s images accumulate into a moving elegy for transience: how modern migration loosens identities yet binds strangers in shared, quiet acts of care.
Details of Cast
Khatra Ould Abder Kader, Maata Ould Mohamed Abeid, Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Mohamed, Fatimetou Mint Ahmeda, Nana Diakité
Details of Crew
Cinematography: Jacques Besse, Editor: Nadia Ben Rachid, Music: Oumou Sangaré
Producer Details
Nicolas Royer Maji-da Abdi
Writer Details
Abderrahmane Sissako
Stills
Categories
- International Competition (14)
- Homage (11)
- World Cinema (57)
- Country Focus : Vietnam (5)
- Indian Cinema Now (7)
- Kaleidoscope (8)
- Malayalam Cinema Today (12)
- Restored Classics (5)
- Opening Film (1)
- Special Screening (1)
- Midnight Screening (2)
- Spirit of Cinema (1)
- Signatures In Motion (4)
- Festival Favourites (13)
- Viva el Cine: Latin American Films (5)
- Saeed Mirza Retrospective (3)
- Ritwik Ghatak Centenary (4)
- Youssef Chahine Retrospective (3)
- Garin Nugroho: The Poetic Archipelago (5)
- The Suvarna Legacy : Suvarna Chakoram (17)
- Her Lens Her Voice (5)
- The Pantheon of IFFK: Lifetime (10)
- From Under The Olive Tree (4)
- 50 Years of Rajeevnath (1)
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