Black Tea

From making Waiting for Happiness and Timbuktu, Abderrahmane Sissako struggles to handle this story with characters that feel aimless and uninteresting to explore and a storyline that becomes convoluted.

Undeniably a well-made production as the camerawork, production designs, costumes, and musical score is really good. The performances from the cast members are solid on it's own. The issues is that the characters unfortunately are not interesting to fully engage with, crafted with poorly written dialogue, messy tone, and directions that clearly indicates that the story doesn't fully understand where it wants to focus on.

The experience of Black people in China is an interesting concept but unfortunately the movie doesn't do a good job on exploring the concepts. Alongside with some really uneven pacing that puts viewers to sleep.

Disappointing.