(1961 - )

Born in Kiffa, Mauritania in 1961, Sissako was raised in Mali, his father's homeland. From 1983-89 he studied film at VGIK in Moscow before moving to Paris. He is both an actor and a director. He was member of jury at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2003, and member of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007.

Le Jeu (1990), a film he presented as a graduation assignment, won the prize for best short at the Giornate del Cinema Africano of Perugia in 1991. Sissako won awards for every movie since Rostov-Luadnda. La vie sur terre received FIPRESCI Prize Special mention in 1998 “For the high level of the director's political debate and the loveable, poetic and ironic view on the everyday life of his characters.” Hermakono received a FIPRESCI Prize in 2002 “For its exquisite poetic depiction of the emotional and humorous complications that can arise in the midst of a simple life.”

• 8 (2008)
• Bamako (2006)
• Heremakono, 2002
• La vie sur terre, 1998
• Rostov-Luanda, 1997 (documentary)
• Sabriya, 1996
• Le chameau et les batons flottants, 1995
• Octobre, 1993
• Le jeu, 1990

“Bamako" is a courtroom drama that takes place within a mud-walled compound. It revolves around an unlikely cast of characters: the plaintiffs are the people of Africa; the defendants, charged with worsening the economic plight of the continent, are the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

In “La vie sure terre”, Sissako plays a version of himself, an expatriate returning from Paris to his father's village in Mali on the eve of the year 2000. One line in that film, from a letter that the young man writes to his father, sums up the ambivalent yearning at the heart of his work: “Is what I learn far from you worth what I forget about us?” Part fiction and part documentary, it was filmed in Mauritania and France.

References: Internet Movie Database http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0803066/

African Film Festivalhttp://www.africanfilmny.org/network/news/Isissako.html

The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/movies/11denn.html?ex=1329454800&en=bc2edcc8d5556364&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink