Berlinale 2024: Abderrahmane Sissako’s Black Tea is a Thickly-Imagined World

Steep tea with any tea aficionado, and they will tell you that the drink is supposed to be, primarily but not essentially, smelt. It is to lengthen the act of consuming it, bringing your attention to the tones and tenors of scent that goes into, but never translates to, taste. Mauritanian-born, Malian-raised, Moscow-trained filmmaker-poet Abderrahmane Sissako, in his latest offering since his widely hailed and vigorously discussed 2014 film Timbuktu about the jihadist takeover of Mali, further broadens the breadth of tea. It is not just aroma and taste, but affect, too, as in the body’s inherent capacity to secrete feeling — and this feeling need not be immediate. These are the three tenets of tea consumption, though consumption is a stale word since tea drinking itself is elevated to an art form, and art evades the language of consumption. 

How, then, to speak of tea, of Sissako’s film, which, too, comes with its own set of instructions to interface with it? The Artforum calls his cinema “free verse”, Guardian calls it “fragmentary”, and it is in this fragmented free verse that his story stumbles. I use the word stumble as a characterization not a criticism, for this is the motion of his film, his dialogues, the transitions within and between scenes. 

Palimpsestic Image-making

The film begins with a wedding in Ivory Coast. Aya (Nina Mélo) in resplendent white, rejects her groom in front of the wedding guests. You can sense that she was uneasy through the ceremony, that her fiancé did something — adultery, perhaps? — that upset her deeply. She walks out of the wedding and the camera, in front of her, moves backwards, overlaid by horizontal tracking shots of a Chinese market, and together, it produces a disorientation and also whets the appetite for a film whose image-making, as much as its culture-making, is palimpsestic. Flares emerge from strange spots in the frame and you realize that the image is being made from behind a glass pane that is reflecting the lights of the city. Strange characters overwrite the previous ones, neither offered completion or an arc to traverse, and to be fair, neither needing it. 

We are now in Guangzhou, China — though it was shot in Taiwan due to filming restrictions, like Sissako passing off a Turkmenistan desert for Mauritania in one of his early shorts, not caring too much for geographic authenticity, preferring attempts at cultural edification, instead. Aya, more relaxed and humored, walks around the market, buying fried food — not for herself — getting her hair done, chatting lovingly with the women there, sauntering into shops run by friends, and then, to the tea export shop, where she works, run by Cai (Han Chang), an older Chinese man, who initiates her into the ceremony of tea. There is love here, too, one that isn’t apparent on the surface, but which purrs when Cai cups Aya’s hands and coddles her body in his, as he directs her how to, precisely, perform the artistry of tea. Their romance is linked to ritual. Outside of it, it is only longing glances. 

Conversation dithers, often cut with strange directness — “What are your dreams?” — or abrupt strays. Dreams puncture the narrative, though it does not feel like a dream, because the language of the film, like the language of dreams, is hazy, meandering, accumulative but not assimilated. It is untidy, this style of crafting stories, whose effect accrues, is never discrete, a swirl, not a swat.  

Tensions and Relationships

The inroads that China has made into Africa, a modern day colonialism, has produced these cultural linkages, inter-racial affairs, and markets like the one Aya works in — “Chocolate City”. It also produces tensions, one that is gently needled when Aya tells another African woman to be kind to a Chinese roadside seller because this is their home. But these tensions can also emerge more grotesquely to the surface. The film arrives at a strange impasse where Cai’s parents make explicitly racist remarks about Africans, and Cai’s son — who has an uneasy but not resentful relationship with his father’s new lease on love — waxes a moving paean. That you do not make roads between countries, but people, and if you do not understand that simple bridging, of what use is all that capitalist peacocking? I say strange, because for so long the film evades such a stringent moral reading. Strange also because in his previous film, Sissako decided to portray the jihadists as humans. “He’s also a fragile being. And fragility is an element that can make anybody tip over into horror,” he told the New York Times. Why, then, does he not afford this same empathy to Cai’s parents? And just as we feel that Sissako has flattened his fleetings worlds, he leaves us with a time-curling wisp of suggestion, of possibility. The film never lands, but whisks uneasily, without explanation. It is a mystery you are happy leaving unsolved. 

Film Companion’s coverage of the Berlinale is made possible by the support of @goethemumbai.