The Poetics of Radical Hope in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Film Experience

Book excerpt: The Poetics of Radical Hope: The Abderrhamane Sissako Experience communicates pieces of evidence that Sissako is the most talented and the most sophisticated filmmaker of his generation. This imaginative excellence emanates from new aspirations to fashion an original African cinematic aesthetic for a politic of radical hope and creative adaptation. Sissako’s contribution extends to all aspects of the indigenous motion pictures industry to help rebuild the continent’s cultural infrastructures and create intellectual and cultural spaces to mobilize narrative strategies to contribute in the making of potent African collectives. Far from being abstract, Sissako's logic of contribution resists facile reading and demands a direct and profound engagement with the text. Sissako is one of the best filmmakers working today because his cinema constitutes a generative contribution to the contemporary production of African intelligibility. This logic of contribution helps to better articulate the historical logics and practices of a continent in constant throes of situational emergencies. The cinemas confront African colonial legacies to contemporary globalization discourses that grip the contemporary global condition, notably: political instability, poverty, illiteracy, digital divide, global warming and food shortages, diseases and the so-called "clash of civilization."