Film Screening & Director's Introduction: 'Ballaké Sissoko, Kora Tales'
World-renowned, award-winning Malian musician Ballaké Sissoko takes us on an unprecedented journey to follow the trail of his instrument, the kora, a West African 21-string harp whose origins are surrounded by legend. Shot on location, the journey begins at Ballaké’s home in Bamako, capital of Mali where he was born and raised. We hear his talented group of young kora students play sublime music on his rooftop, songs he has taught them from the traditional repertoire of his father, who was from Gambia but settled in Mali in the 1960s, early years of its independence.
Ballaké’s cousin demonstrates the complex craft of making a kora, and takes Ballaké for the first time to visit the majestic rocky hills where the great Mali empire began.
Travelling further westwards to Senegal and Gambia, to his ancestral homeland, Ballaké traverses by canoe the beautiful Casamance river to drop in on a family of kora players who keep alive the old traditional style of the instrument. Inspired, Ballaké plays the kora late into the night, to the sounds of crickets and night birds, on his way to visit a sacred location where according to myth, the kora was first invented by invisible spirits, the djinns.
Narrated by celebrated Malian rapper Oxmo Puccino, this film takes us for the first time to the heart of the kora tradition, and to the mystique and legend around it.
Language: Bambara, Mandinka, French. With English and French subtitles
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World-renowned, award-winning Malian musician Ballaké Sissoko takes us on an unprecedented journey to follow the trail of his instrument, the kora, a West African 21-string harp whose origins are surrounded by legend. Shot on location, the journey begins at Ballaké’s home in Bamako, capital of Mali where he was born and raised. We hear his talented group of young kora students play sublime music on his rooftop, songs he has taught them from the traditional repertoire of his father, who was from Gambia but settled in Mali in the 1960s, early years of its independence.
Ballaké’s cousin demonstrates the complex craft of making a kora, and takes Ballaké for the first time to visit the majestic rocky hills where the great Mali empire began.
Travelling further westwards to Senegal and Gambia, to his ancestral homeland, Ballaké traverses by canoe the beautiful Casamance river to drop in on a family of kora players who keep alive the old traditional style of the instrument. Inspired, Ballaké plays the kora late into the night, to the sounds of crickets and night birds, on his way to visit a sacred location where according to myth, the kora was first invented by invisible spirits, the djinns.
Narrated by celebrated Malian rapper Oxmo Puccino, this film takes us for the first time to the heart of the kora tradition, and to the mystique and legend around it.
Language: Bambara, Mandinka, French. With English and French subtitles
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