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It’s been more than a decade since Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako last released a film. His 2014 feature “Timbuktu” was widely celebrated for its quiet power and political precision, earning an Oscar nomination and solidifying his place as one of Africa’s most respected contemporary auteurs. Then came the silence. But it wasn’t absence.
We were speaking via Zoom on May 7—ironically, Sissako in the U.S. for the release of his latest work “Black Tea,” me in France for Cannes. “It was personal,” he said plainly. “All my movies come with time. Six, seven years between each. This one took longer because of the opera.”
That opera—”Le Vol du Boli”—premiered in Paris in 2020, during Sissako’s collaboration with British musician Damon Albarn. The production traced the journey of a boli, a sacred West African object, from pre-colonial society through slavery, colonization, and into the present day. Sissako agreed to direct under two conditions: “I told them, I’ve never directed opera,” he recalls. “But if I can be free, completely free, and if I can make something that centers Africa, then yes, I accept.”
It was a chance, he said, to do something big on a respected stage as an African filmmaker. The opera took two years to develop, and only after that did he begin shaping “Black Tea.”
Now, ten years after “Timbuktu”, Sissako returns to U.S. theaters with “Black Tea”, released by Cohen Media Group—the same distributor that helped push “Timbuktu” to an unprecedented $1 million U.S. box office haul. The new film opens in select U.S. theaters on May 9, 2025.
“Black Tea” premiered at the 2024 Berlinale and tells the story of Aya (Nina Mélo), a young woman from Côte d’Ivoire who walks away from her wedding and travels to Guangzhou, China. She finds herself in the city’s “Chocolate City,” a real-life neighborhood known for its African immigrant population. There, she begins working in a tea shop run by Cai (Chang Han), a quiet, middle-aged Chinese man. Over time, a delicate connection forms between them, rooted less in grand romantic gestures and more in the quiet rituals of tea-making. Sissako uses this setting to explore identity, exile, intimacy, and the kind of unspoken understanding that can exist across language and culture.
This idea—that representation means more than geography or politics—is carried through every frame. “People expect Africa to always look to the West. To Europe, to the U.S.,” he said. “But that’s not our only path. China has had relations with Africa for a long time. It’s not talked about in a realistic way in the West. Their conversations do not capture the layers of engagement.”
Sissako’s frustration with how Africa’s movements are framed, as always reactive, never self-directed, was clear. “The West sees China as a monster. But that’s not how I see it,” he told me. “Yes, we must be careful with every political interaction with other systems. But China’s history with Africa is complex. And it’s not only about fear. I wanted to change the concept of how people view Africa and immigration.”
He added: “You go to Guangzhou today, you’ll meet Nigerians, Senegalese, they speak Chinese, Yoruba, Wolof, all at the same time. This is not fiction.” He was adamant that the story he told was real, and current. “This is a different film. It’s more personal. But personal is also political.”
His attention to character in “Black Tea,” especially a woman making choices that defy expectation, opens up new ways of thinking about what counts as political in cinema. Sissako’s approach here doesn’t announce its politics. Instead, it lives in small decisions and quiet acts.
I asked whether Aya’s decision to leave was personal. Was she rejecting tradition, or simply following her own instincts? Sissako leaned into the complexity. “It’s a deep and complicated question,” he said. “Art is not about giving answers… My vision was to show a strong and beautiful person who can make the decision.” Then, more directly: “The dream of an African person, to go, to learn, to experience something, just out of curiosity, is not considered. People think: ‘They are desperate, they just want to find a place to live better.’ But that’s not the totality of the African migration experience.”
At one point, he paused and said, “Of course, I don’t know what you think about the movie… maybe people expect something specific coming from me also.” It was a gentle acknowledgment that “Black Tea” doesn’t land the way his earlier films did, especially for viewers looking for the overt political charge of “Timbuktu.” I told him that I had sensed some of that—people searching for something more obviously political and feeling unsure when they didn’t find it. He didn’t flinch. “This kind of movie was very important for me to shoot,” he said. “Because nobody can stop the movement of humanity.” What mattered to him wasn’t protest, but presence. “Africa is not the future. Africa is the now,” he said. His focus had shifted, he added. He wasn’t trying to meet expectations. “I was making a film I felt needed to exist.”
In Aya, Sissako presents a character who is neither victim nor hero. “She is strong. She makes a hard decision. To say no at the altar, to leave everything behind, is not easy. Not in Africa. Not anywhere.” He reminded me that “Black Tea” is not only Aya’s story. “It’s the story of four women,” he said. Alongside Aya are Ying (Wu Ke-Xi), Cai’s ex-wife; Douyue (Jacqueline Zhu Zhi-Ying), a local hairdresser; and Mei (Pei-Jen Yu), another woman in the community on her own separate journey of discovery.
Their lives don’t always intersect, and not all are given full arcs, but they form a quiet constellation around Aya. “They’re similar,” Sissako told me. “Cai says: ‘My previous wife left me.’ Ying says: ‘My partner left me too.’ And Aya, she walks away.” The film doesn’t spell out each woman’s rupture, but their parallel departures, across cultures and generations, create what he called “a mirror” running through the film.
That moment was a reframing for me. I had seen it as Aya’s journey, full stop. But Sissako was pointing to a larger mosaic, a conversation between women, across cultures and timelines, about what it means to say no. “It’s not really a love story,” he said, “but maybe the beginning of one. What matters is the respect. The attempt to create something beautiful together.”
The emotional space that Aya and her new acquaintances inhabit is made tangible by the film’s core setting—a tea shop in Guangzhou. It’s not just a location; it becomes a portal.
“It’s physically underground,” he said, “but it’s also a place of peace. A place of protection. When people go there, something can happen.” He spoke about how carefully he and his production designer, Véronique Sacrez, built it. “I used music to create intimacy. It’s silence and sound, together. And we worked a lot with the actors, especially with the lead, to understand the tea ceremony. The process, the ritual—it was important.”
He was clear that this wasn’t some borrowed French romance, an Eurocentric framing of love as abstract or melancholic. “I didn’t want a French-style love story,” he said. “I wanted my own vision. Two people trying to connect—not through drama, but through care.”
But that kind of vision—quiet, cross-cultural, unconcerned with market expectations—doesn’t always make financing easy. Especially when the leads are an African woman and a Chinese man, and the film resists familiar narrative formulas.
“It’s always difficult to make movies,” he said. “But maybe it’s easier for me now because I’m focused. I have other things taking up time in my life. And if I don’t make a movie, my life is the same.” He wasn’t being dismissive. He was describing the freedom that comes from disconnection. “In Mauritania, people don’t know my films. I’m not a celebrity. I go to the forest. I help protect it. I forget cinema.” It should have landed with sadness—this quiet distance between him and the country he’s from.
But he didn’t say it like someone troubled by it. Rather, more as if he’d made peace with the disconnection, even if it still meant something.
He told me that his next film will be an adaptation of David Diop’s 2018 novel “At Night All Blood Is Black”, which explores the harrowing experiences of Senegalese soldiers during World War I. “It will be mostly silent and in black-and-white,” Sissako said. “Nobody expects that from me. That’s why I have to do it.” Omar Sy bought the rights to the novel, performing a reading from it on stage in 2021, and asked Sissako to direct. “I said yes,” he told me. “Now it’s his job to find the money.” We both laughed with a shared understanding.
For Sissako, the idea that African filmmakers must always make the same kind of film, especially once they’ve found recognition, is one he actively resists. “If I don’t make this next film, I don’t know if anyone else will. Not because others aren’t capable, but because they won’t get the chance.”
It echoed something Mahamat-Saleh Haroun once said during a past interview—that people in Chad expect him to tell every story, and while he can’t, he feels compelled to tell the ones he can, because he has the platform, and isn’t sure anyone else will.
Leaning into that, I asked Sissako if he felt his role as a filmmaker had changed over the past 25 years. Answering slowly, carefully, he said, “That’s a very complicated question I have not really had before. And it’s an equally long and complicated answer.” He spoke of regret, not for the films he’s made, but for the time he’s let pass. “Maybe I should have put more energy into doing more films. Maybe I was more comfortable with the long process.” And yet, he’s clear-eyed about the conditions in which he works. “To be a filmmaker living in Paris is not ideal for me. If you’re far from your country, it takes something from you. That’s why I returned to Mauritania. There’s a different energy there. It’s stronger.”
He brought up Djibril Diop Mambéty. “He lived in Paris, like me,” Sissako reflected. “But maybe if he had stayed in Senegal, had a long life there, he could have gone further, faster.” It wasn’t a critique. It was a way of wondering, maybe, about his own choices, about what might be lost when one builds a career far from home.
Then he turned to the late Malian pioneer Souleymane Cissé, not as a peer but as a counterpoint. “The greatest,” he said. Cissé had stayed and built from where he was. And Sissako, it seemed, was still turning that over. “The subjects, the form, what he does, how he does it, it’s amazing.” He was referring to Cissé’s style, technique, the themes he took on, and the precision with which he rendered them. “I’m even a bit jealous,” he added. “But I respect it all deeply.”
If “Black Tea” defies expectation by looking “eastward,” Sissako’s next project bends time itself, toward memory, war, and the ghosts of colonial violence. For the veteran filmmaker, both stories are about presence—of being in the world, on one’s own terms.
“I don’t want to make simple movies,” he repeated, near the end of our conversation. “I prefer to wait. To choose. And when I do, it has to be something nobody else can—or will—make.”
“Black Tea,” released by Cohen Media Group, opens in select U.S. theaters on May 9.