IFFR 2007

Abderrahmane Sissako

Two men who have shared a love for chess since their youth are driven apart by two women.

Film Maker in Focus: Abderrahmane Sissako

Africa Dreaming

In the back garden of the communal dwelling in a poor district of Bamako, Mali, a people’s tribunal is set up to lay charges against the IMF and the World Bank on behalf of the people of Africa. The life of a female vocalist and her unemployed husband, who live in the house, are also influenced by the court case.

Bamako

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun

When the government of Chad releases all the war criminals from the Civil War that scourged the country from 1965, the 15-year-old Atim takes the law into his own hands. He goes looking for his father’s murderer: he wants to kill him. Instead of that, a complex and encouraging father-son relationship develops.

Dry Season

Poetic observations in a small town on the coast of Mauretania, a transit haven where people wait for happiness. At the intersection of uprooting, melancholy and serenity.

Heremakono

Sissako’s second tells the story of the doomed relationship between a young Russian woman and an African student who lives temporarily in Moscow. The woman is pregnant but the man has to go back to Africa.

Octobre

Travelogue by Sissako who sets off in Angola looking for the resistance fighter Baribanga, with whom he made an unforgettable train journey in Russia 16 years before.

Rostov-Luanda

Improvised yet visually stunning film is a musical and poetic millennium sketch of a poor African village.

IFFR 2025
30 Jan – 9 Feb 2025