The African Film Festival, from its first festival in 1993, which showcased the works of Sembene Ousmane to this, its Tenth Anniversary Festival presenting a mid-career retrospective of Abderrahmane Sissako, has served up a sumptuous visual banquet of African cinema. AFF Executive Director Mahen Bonetti has ensured that the cinematic genius of Africa has become integral to our visual vocabulary. This is no mean feat when considering the material difficulties experienced by African filmmakers, the obstacles presented by governmental policies, and the ongoing battle to combat stereotypical beliefs.

The central work in this years festival, Heremakono (Waiting for Happiness) directed by Mauritanian filmmaker Sissako, won the 2003 Stallion Yennenga, the top award given at FESPACO, the Festival of Pan-African Film and Television, held annually in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

Heremakono is a film of awesome visual beauty that addresses the profundity of the human condition. The film's locale, a town established where the desert literally meets the sea, is itself a metaphor for the theme that Sissako addresses in several of his films. The liminal, the unidentified, the unnamed space separating people, objects, desires and realities contrasts with the efforts of individuals to name, to communicate, to create a shared vocabulary of experience, or simply to connect to each other.

Set in Nouadhibou, a town located on the northern coastline of Mauritania, Heremakono presents vignettes of its inhabitants as they are encountered by the films central character, Abdullah. For many, Nouadhibou is merely a transit town: one stops there before a return home or before going elsewhere in hope of a better life. Suspended in a condition of waiting, for many of it's inhabitants Nouadhibou is neither home nor destination.

Abdullah himself is visiting his mother before traveling on to Europe. Unable to speak hassaniya, the local variant of Arabic, he cannot meaningfully communicate with his family or with the larger community. He becomes an observer whose condition of existence is that of a transient anticipating a departure to a land that is not his own, but that has become linguistically and culturally comfortable for him. He observes the lives of the inhabitants in the community: the young orphan Khatra apprenticed to an elderly electrician, a displaced asian worker in a karaoke bar; Nana, a young prostitute, and a traditional singer training a young girl.

As an audience, our comprehension of the people and events mirrors that of Abdullah- we can only observe. What meaning we take away depends upon our own ability to connect.

(Director Abderrahmane Sissako was born in Mauritania in 1961. He spent his childhood in Mali and returned to Mauritania before leaving for Moscow to study film.)