Virtual Reality and Talk - Meet Director Abderrahmane Sissako About His Film *Artou*

On Sunday, 4 October 2026, CinéMo will be delighted to welcome Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako for his film Artou, selected for the 2026 Venice Film Festival. On this special occasion, he will meet the audience and discuss his film, his approach to filmmaking and the creative possibilities offered by virtual reality.

There are two time slots available:

• 3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.: Screening at CinéMo, followed by an exclusive discussion with Abderrahmane Sissako inside CinéMo.

• 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.: Screening at CinéMo, followed by a talk with Abderrahmane Sissako at 6:30 pm in the Festival’s Chill Zone.

Abderrahmane Sissako

Abderrahmane Sissako crafts deeply humanist and engaged works, exploring the complex relationships between the Global North and South, as well as the fate of a resilient yet challenged Africa. A filmmaker navigating cultures and continents, Sissako was born in Mauritania in 1961, spent his childhood in Mali, and left for the Soviet Union in 1983 to study cinema at VGIK in Moscow. There, he directed his first short films, including Le Jeu (1989) and Octobre (1991,37 minutes), which was selected for Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival in 1993. In the early 1990s, he settled in France, where he directed La Vie sur Terre (1998), screened at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs. His next feature, Heremakono (Waiting for Happiness), was selected for Un Certain Regard in 2002 and won the FIPRESCI Prize. He returned to Cannes in 2006 with Bamako, presented out of competition. In 2014, Timbuktu became the first Mauritanian film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (2015). In France, it won seven César Awards, including Best Director and Best Film. In 2022, Sissako collaborated with Damon Albarn to create the opera Le Vol du Boli at the Théâtre du Châtelet. His latest film, Black Tea, was released in 2024.

CinéMo

CinéMo is a mobile cinema run by the Fondation Art Explora, designed with the support of the Fondation CANAL+. Equipped with 72 seats, it travels to meet audiences where they are, offering free film screenings and introductory cinema workshops to as many people and in as many territories as possible. At the Art Explora Festival, CinéMo invites you to discover 2 immersive films through virtual reality headsets. An experience that offers a new way of discovering cinema, through total immersion.

Discover two immersive 360° films:

• Artou, Abderrahmane Sissako, 2026 (28 min) Selected for the 2026 Venice Film Festival. Following their father’s death in Europe, three sisters and three brothers fulfil the patriarch’s final wish: to be buried next to his own father, in eternal sleep, in his native village in Mauritania.

• ‍The Island of the Dead, Benjamin Nuel, 2018 (8 min). A timeless journey, from an ordinary apartment to our final destination, guided by Charon, the ferryman of the Underworld. The horizon is the same for everyone: unchanging, inevitable. The question has always been the same, across all civilisations and throughout time: what comes next? Is there even anything at all?

A shared virtual reality experience

For its second season, CinéMo is joining the TRAVERSE network, a distribution initiative dedicated to immersive virtual reality works, which supports the emergence of new forms of storytelling by making them accessible to the public in suitable cultural spaces.

CinéMo will offer introductory sessions for school groups (middle and high schools) and local organizations, allowing them to explore immersive works with guidance from the TRAVERSE network.Sessions for the general public are also scheduled daily, as well as on weekends. All of our sessions are led by two facilitators on board the truck.

Virtual reality is not recommended for children under 8, pregnant women, or people with certain medical or physical conditions (heart conditions, epilepsy, high blood pressure, vertigo, motion sickness, etc.).