Malian/Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako is one of the most acclaimed and well-known film directors in Africa, particularly francophone Africa. His films, including La Vie sur terre/Life on Earth (1998, Mali/France/Mauritania), Heremakono/Waiting for Happiness (2002, France/Mauritania), and Bamako (2006, Mali/France/USA) are among the most widely distributed African films in Europe, the UK, and North America, and Timbuktu (2014, Mauritania/France), his most recent film, is one of the most feted and one of the highest grossing African films of all time. Despite Sissako's relative success in both award and box office terms, the overall reception of his films has been mixed; for example, his films have been accused of depicting Africa in a way that reinforces stereotypes of the continent prevalent in the Global North (Adesokan 2010; Beau 2015; Cessou 2014). The divergent responses to Sissako's work derive from a type of clash between the transnational orientation of his films, and an idea of African cinema as a ‘revolt against colonialism, and then against neo-colonialism, dependency, and euro-centrism’ (Harrow 2007: 1). This critical paradigm, which David Murphy has described as cinematic regionalism, rooted in ‘a reductive opposition between Western and African culture’ (2006: 28), derives from francophone African postindependence politics and an accompanying aesthetics of liberation. This regionalism evolved as an attempt to correct the role the cinematic image had played in supporting and sustaining French colonial-era policies and hierarchies (Tcheuyap 2006: 9–11), and it was seen as a method of creating plurality and equality in filmic production and in global relations.

Sissako's films, with their global reach, their relative commercial and critical success, and their divergence with respect to received, established notions of African film production both resemble and anticipate the collection of English-language novels that Taiye Selasi in 2005 termed ‘Afropolitan’, as well as the francophone concepts of littérature-monde and cinéma-monde that Afropolitanism inspired. In that respect, it is useful to consider Sissako's work in terms of its relationship to these other transnational, cosmopolitan models of cultural production, and to examine the modes through which all of these interrogate global power dynamics in the face of globalisation.