Black Tea

Black Tea
Abderrahmane Sissako, France, Taiwan, Luxembourg, Mauritania, 2024, 110’

A mysterious film about love and freedom that bridges the divides between Africa and China, dreams and reality, past and present.

After Aya, a woman in her early thirties, says a fatal “no” at the wedding altar, she travels from the Ivory Coast to China to start a new life. In the shop where she works, she becomes close to Cai, who introduces her to the secrets of the ancient tea ceremony. In the shadow of the past and cultural differences, a tender love is born. In a mysterious and melancholic film about love and freedom, the director dissects the divides between Africa and China, dreams and reality, and past and present.

“There were probably the first stirrings of Black Tea in a scene in Waiting for Happiness. A Chinese immigrant is having dinner with an African woman and he breaks out into karaoke. In it, I tackled what I consider a fundamental theme: encounters. As for cultural identity, I never explore characters as defined by their belonging to a particular group of people. I have the feeling that those who leave have left mentally long before their actual voyage. Voluntary departure and exile have something interesting to say about identity. And for me, the cinema is a way to express that. And especially Black Tea, in which I explain that wherever they come from, people share a common desire to live a happy life understanding and comprehending others, which is the case with Aya and Cai. /…/ Black Tea foreshadows what the world will inevitably become, a place where everything is created via encounters. That is proven by our world in motion that has become globalized, whether for good or evil. But I have not abandoned the political approach in this film: when one of the characters says that the Silk Road does not work anymore, that is a way of saying that we can no longer build bridges between countries to transport only material goods. Those bridges must also serve to connect human beings.”

– Abderrahmane Sissako