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Former films sales and acquisitions exec Sata Cissokho made her debut as the new head of the Berlinale's World Cinema Fund (WCF) this year, replacing Vincenzo Bugno who stepped down at the end of 2025 after 21 years in the job.
Launched in 2004 as a joint initiative between the festival and the German Federal Cultural Foundation to support filmmakers in places with a fragile filmmaking infrastructure, the fund has supported more than 320 films over its 22 years of existence.
Territories covered by the initiative include Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific region, Africa, the Middle East, Central and Southeast Asia, the Caucasus, as well as Bangladesh, Nepal, Mongolia and Sri Lanka.
Its funding model is rare among European funds for Global South productions, in that the recipients are obliged to spend 90% of the money they receive in the country of production, rather than in Germany or on German cast and crew.
"It's moving the discussion around ownership... the power dynamic between the main producer and the German producer is very different from that of many other European funding schemes," says Cissokho.
She is taking up the baton in the wake of a bumper year for the fund, which saw 16 grantees make it into major festivals, including Cannes Critics' Week Grand Prix winner A Useful Ghost and Cannes Un Certain Regard selection Aisha Can't Fly Away.
There were two WCF-backed films in this edition of the Berlinale - Indonesian director Edwin's Sleep No More in the Berlinale Special Midnight sidebar and Narciso by Paraguayan director Marcelo Martinessi in Panorama.
The WCF Day, taking place in the second week of the festival, featured a conversation with the French Senegalese director Alain Gomis, whose drama Dao played in Competition, as well as focuses on South-East Asian cinema, and a talk on the international sales opportunities for films hailing from the regions covered by fund.
After business studies in her native Marseilles and London, Cissokho first connected with cinema while doing an internship with the Gamma photography agency in Paris.
Beyond the stage, which brought her into contact with production companies, Cissokho's stay in the French capital introduced her to an array of different types of cinema, through the city's vibrant arthouse exhibition scene.
"I had this opportunity to go watch films in cinemas, original language, subtitles, classics, films coming from countries I had never even thought of... living in Paris when I was 18, opened up my perception of cinema and the world," she says.
On the back of this experience, she took a marketing assistant job at New York-based distribution company Zeitgeist Films, followed by a stint at Tribeca Film Festival, returning to Paris two years later to do a Master's in cinema at the Sorbonne University.
Love of discoveries
Cissokho arrived at the WCF from Paradise City, rebranded from Memento Film International in 2025, where she worked for more than a decade, kicking off with its label Artscope, focused on first and second features films by directors with a strong artistic vision.
"I did my first acquisition two months in. It was a first feature from India called Court by Chaitanya Tamhane, which premiered in Venice and won Lion of the Future," recalls Cissokho of the film which debuted in Venice's Orizzonti sidebar in 2014, also winning its best film award.
Over time, scouting films by new talents and voices from around the world became Cissokho's speciality, with other acquisitions she is proud of including This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, Omen by Baloji, I Only Rest in the Storm by Pedro Pinho and The Ugly Stepsister by Emilie Blichfeld.
"In the end, my primary focus was on discoveries and most of the time those discoveries were coming from the Global South, as we call it," says Cissokho, adding that the move to the WCF came naturally.
"I wanted to explore other things and change my relationship to films and filmmakers, and having worked with producers and directors from those countries, made the move very natural."
Exciting time for world cinema & plans
Cissokho says it an exciting time to be taking up the WCF baton, citing growing interest in cinema from outside of the U.S. and Europe, even if financing remains a challenge.
"When you look at a film like The Secret Agent, for example, there are lots of films that fall into the category of world cinema, let's say, which manage to reach a bigger audience. You can see they're not being pigeonholed anymore in that world cinema category," she says.
"There's a sense of bigger opportunities for the filmmakers coming from these countries to reach out to larger audiences," she continues,. "At the same time, funding is shrinking for sure so I think we all collectively need to think creatively on how to best cater to those filmmakers; how we can help them and also how we can convince public institutions of the need to back them, because in the end, if the only option for funding becomes equity, it might become a problem for many of these filmmakers."
The fund currently supports around 15 films a year through two strands: WCF Classic (involving German producers) and WCF Europe (funded by Creative Europe). There are two funding calls a year, with the latest round closing March 4.
As she gets to grips with her new role Cissokho, says one of her early ambitions is to grow collaborations between the WCF and the African continent, suggesting its filmmakers have been less represented in the funding rounds than other regions over the last 20 years.
Cissokho, who was born and raised in France, acknowledges this desire stems partly from the fact she is of Senegalese descent but not only.
"Growing up, I didn't have a lot of opportunities to see films coming from the African continent. Even for me, having an African family, those films were not that accessible... I've been eager to allow for more visibility for films and filmmakers coming from the continent," she says.
She points to burgeoning indie cinema hotspots in places like Senegal where Dao director Gomis launched the cinema-focused Yennenga Center in 2018.
"It's a slow process for public institutions to realize that there is value and power behind funding films that can reach an audience outside of the local markets, but it's something that I want to dig into and support as much as possible," she says.
Other goals for her initial two-year mandate, she says, include overhauling the funding application process, to make it at once, more accessible to emerging filmmakers and supportive of established directors embracing bigger, more ambitious projects.
"I want to look at how we can align it more with the needs of the filmmakers, revamping the calls for applications, the bids and the regulations; maybe opening a new way for first and second time directors, so they're not in the same group as more established directors, and maybe changing the budget limit to be able to support films that are ambitious, but I'm still in the phase of exploring, understanding, discussing, before making decisions," she says.
