HEREMAKONO (Waiting for Happiness), Abderrahmane Sissako, 2002. 

fragmentary, elegiac and poetic, Heremakono is the portrait of a small Mauritanian town by the sea, a kind of limbo between Arab-brought religion, indigenous culture and enormous ships that herald contact with the mythic Europe of yore. the lives of the village characters - a broken prostitute, an incompetent electrician, a bright-eyed little youngster, an elderly lady teaching a girl to sing a song passed by oral tradition for milennia on a traditional instrument, and a karaoke-spouting Chinese immigrant - unfurl over small cinematic episodes. the cinematography transforms the barren, desolate landscape into a topography of melancholy and stunning beauty. one of my first forays into African cinema and definitely definitely recommended.

from Slant Magazine: If the film’s Mauritanian port city becomes a desert purgatory between the North and the South then its rootless characters are not unlike ghosts suffocated by their geographic not-being. Colossal sand dunes around the periphery of the town and abandoned ships on the ocean horizon evoke far-off heavens. The town is a vacuum into which this distant civilization drops its cultural baggage (karaoke music, television sets).

HEREMAKONO (Waiting for Happiness), Abderrahmane Sissako, 2002. 

fragmentary, elegiac and poetic, Heremakono is the portrait of a small Mauritanian town by the sea, a kind of limbo between Arab-brought religion, indigenous culture and enormous ships that herald contact with the mythic Europe of yore. the lives of the village characters - a broken prostitute, an incompetent electrician, a bright-eyed little youngster, an elderly lady teaching a girl to sing a song passed by oral tradition for milennia on a traditional instrument, and a karaoke-spouting Chinese immigrant - unfurl over small cinematic episodes. the cinematography transforms the barren, desolate landscape into a topography of melancholy and stunning beauty. one of my first forays into African cinema and definitely definitely recommended.

from Slant Magazine: If the film’s Mauritanian port city becomes a desert purgatory between the North and the South then its rootless characters are not unlike ghosts suffocated by their geographic not-being. Colossal sand dunes around the periphery of the town and abandoned ships on the ocean horizon evoke far-off heavens. The town is a vacuum into which this distant civilization drops its cultural baggage (karaoke music, television sets).