Introduction

Born in Kiffa, Mauritania in 1961, brought up in Mali, trained at the VGIK film school in Moscow thanks to a Soviet bursary, and resident in Paris since the early 1990s, Sissako is the archetypal filmmaker as exile. He is very much the product of the European exile that foreign film school training entails. Though he tells us he read the militant theorists Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire when he was young (quoting the latter in the commentary of Life on Earth/La Vie sur terre), his film tastes are very Westernised. Asked about the films that have influenced him, he cites not his African forerunners, but Fellini's La Strada, Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood and Andrei Rublev, Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul and Antonioni's The Passenger. Sissako's notion of African cinema also differs radically from that of the pioneers of the 1960s, for whom the notion of truly African voices in cinema was so important. Talking to an interviewer in 1995, Sissako said: