Review | Berlin 2024: Black Tea movie review – first film about the African diaspora in China directed by an African is a massive disappointment
- Black Tea, directed by Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako, revolves around an Ivorian woman’s life in Guangzhou
- It does not live up to its promise, with stilted dialogue, shallow characters and a tone-deaf representation of the African diaspora’s experience in the country
2/5 stars
Down the years, many a documentary has been made about the African diaspora in China – Mans Mansson’s Stranded in Canton, for example, or Christiane Badgley’s Guangzhou Dream Factory – but they were made by non-African filmmakers.
Anticipations were high, therefore, when award-winning Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako (Waiting for Happiness, Timbuktu) was revealed to have made a fictional feature about the subject with Black Tea, which premiered in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival yesterday.
The film, however, has proved to be a massive disappointment on so many levels.
Revolving around an Ivorian woman’s life in Guangzhou, a city in Guangdong province, Sissako’s first film for nearly a decade is undermined by thinly sketched characters, stilted dialogue and a generally tone-deaf understanding about what life is like in China – not just for Africans, but even for the Chinese themselves.
Black Tea is set in a part of Guangzhou where people of different cultures and religions converge to do business, work and, well, cut hair or have theirs cut. Among them is Aya (Nina Mélo), a young woman trying to start a new life abroad after leaving her cheating fiancé at the altar back in Abidjan, in Ivory Coast.