General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Waiting for Happiness (等待幸福)

Waiting for Happiness (French: En attendant le bonheur; original title Heremakono; Chinese: 期待幸福, also translated 等待好运) is a 2002 drama film written and directed by Abderrahmane Sissako, a co-production of France and Mauritania set in the Mauritanian coastal town of Nouadhibou.¹ It premiered at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize, and went on to take the top award at FESPACO 2003.²^•³ The English title is also used for unrelated works, including a 2009 Japanese romance film (等待幸福) directed by 中井庸友 and released on 28 February 2009.⁴

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Heremakono (En attendant le bonheur), a Malian word for houses built only for temporary accommodation, meaning "waiting for happiness"⁵
Director and writer	Abderrahmane Sissako, who also produced¹
Production	France and Mauritania, 2002; production companies Chinguitty Films and ARTE France Cinéma; French release 15 January 2003¹
Runtime	Listed as 95 minutes by Cineuropa and trigon-film, and 96 minutes by the Festival de Cannes and IFFR¹^•²
Languages	Hassaniya, Bambara, and French⁶
Principal awards	FIPRESCI Prize, Un Certain Regard, Cannes 2002; Grand Prize (Étalon de Yennega), FESPACO 2003; Best Film, Buenos Aires BAFICI 2003; Special Jury Award, Gijón 2002²^•³
Cast	Non-professional actors, including Khatra Ould Abdel Kader, Maata Ould Mohamed Abeid, and Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Mohamed¹

Spoilers

Story and characters

The central figure is Abdallah (Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Mohamed), a seventeen-year-old who arrives in Nouadhibou to visit his mother before leaving for Europe for good.⁸ Although he grew up there, he no longer speaks the local dialect and wears Western clothes that mark him as an outsider, so he becomes a largely silent observer of the town.⁷ Around him move Nana, a young woman who wants to seduce him; Makan, who like Abdallah dreams of Europe; and Maata, a former fisherman now working as an electrician, whose apprentice is the orphan Khatra. It is Khatra who teaches Abdallah the local language so that he can break out of the silence that traps him.¹ The Festival de Cannes synopsis adds a Chinese immigrant who courts a local woman by singing karaoke, and notes that the characters' gazes stay fixed on distant horizons while they wait for a hypothetical happiness.²

Improvised method. Sissako does not work from a finished script. For Heremakono he had a synopsis of about forty pages, but the film was essentially improvised with the non-professional actors he met in Nouadhibou, who played versions of themselves and provided much of the dialogue; his working method was to bring people into the film by inviting them to tell their own stories as well.⁹ The IFFR catalog describes the result as poetic and calm reflections that never adopt an absolute standpoint.⁵

Title and setting

The film's title is borrowed from a word in Mali, where houses built only for temporary accommodation are called heremakono: they are "waiting for happiness". Nouadhibou, on the coast of Mauritania, is described as a small village full of such houses, a transit haven from which Africans from different countries hope to make the leap to affluent Europe, earning some money before starting the journey in a place where any feeling of home is absent.⁵ The Australian festival MIFF called the town "a windblown village of mainly temporary housing, which most people merely pass through".⁷

Reception and awards

At Cannes 2002 the FIPRESCI jury awarded the film its Un Certain Regard prize "for its exquisite poetic depiction of the emotional and humorous complications that can arise in the midst of a simple life".¹⁰ The film then accumulated festival honors across 2002 and 2003: the Special Jury Award at Gijón, the IMA Grand Prize at the Paris Biennal of Arab Cinema, the Youth Jury Émile Cantillon Award at Namur, Best Film at the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, and the Grand Prize, the Étalon de Yennega, at FESPACO in Ouagadougou, where Joseph Kpobly also won for Best Sets.³ At FESPACO the jury head, the Burkinabé director Idrissa Ouedraogo, praised "the poetic dimension and metaphorical language of the film" and said the winner embodied "a philosophical reflection on Africa and the continent's future"; Sissako himself said he was "astonished and happy" while acknowledging that his film was not easily accessible.¹¹

Critical reception was divided along the film's pace. Rotten Tomatoes records a 78% Tomatometer from 18 reviews against a 52% audience score, with critics such as Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter calling it a film for viewers willing to endure its "extremely languorous rhythms", and Dennis Schwartz describing it as a "strikingly beautiful visual mood piece".¹² Its United States theatrical gross was $2.0K.¹²

The director

Abderrahmane Sissako was born in 1961 in Kiffa, Mauritania, grew up in Mali, and studied film at the VGIK film school in Moscow before settling in France in the early 1990s.¹³ Heremakono was his first unequivocally fictional feature, following the documentary-inflected Rostov-Luanda (1997) and Life on Earth (1998); it was selected at Un Certain Regard in 2002 and received the FIPRESCI award.¹³ He later directed Bamako (2006) and Timbuktu (2014), the latter becoming Mauritania's first entry nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.¹³ In an interview at Cannes in 2002, Sissako said the title "tricks and misleads" on purpose, since the pursuit of happiness cannot simply mean arriving in Paris or elsewhere: "one builds happiness differently, and one reaches it when one has hope".¹⁴

Music and craft

The score draws on the Malian singer Oumou Sangaré, performing in the Wassoulou style, together with the oud player and composer Anouar Brahem; cinematography is by Jacques Besse and editing by Nadia Ben Rachid.⁶^•¹ The film was shot on 35mm, and festival catalogs note its songs passed from generation to generation and the sounds of wind and sea as part of its texture.⁷^•⁸

Other films of the same name

The Chinese title 等待幸福 also belongs to a 2009 Japanese romance film directed by 中井庸友, starring 玉山鉄二, 麻衣子, and 勝地涼, set on an Okinawan island and released on 28 February 2009; its source novel won the first "Japan Love Story Grand Prix" in 2006.⁴ A 2013 Chinese drama titled 守候 (also translated Waiting) is a separate work about a coal miner caring for his mother.¹⁵

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Coming-of-age films › Coming-of-age films released 2000 to 2009

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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