The continent must express itself on film, Danny Glover and Abderrahmane Sissako tell Vanessa Walters

"I choose roles that I think will be important. I am a cultural worker as well as an artist. I try to pick those stories that have importance to the world. My politics came long before my work." It may come as a surprise that the man who utters these sentiments is none other than Danny Glover, best known as the star of the Lethal Weapon series. But besides his current role in the Beyoncé vehicle Dreamgirls, Glover will shortly be appearing in British cinemas in a much more interesting proposition: Bamako, an angry and affecting film by the Malian director Abderrahmane Sissako.

Glover is a passionate advocate of African and African-American cinema, a cause he has taken up in addition to other political activities. (He is a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Development Programme, and has lobbied US policy-makers on behalf of Africa and the Caribbean. He also sits on the board of the pan-Latin American TV network Telesur, founded by the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez.) Glover is involved in Fespaco, the biennial festival of pan-African film in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and has previously backed or appeared in several African projects. For Bamako, he acted as an executive producer and also appears briefly in a surreal Wild West sequence; but it is clear that, most importantly, he has lent his considerable clout to getting it financed and released.

"Man, wherever he comes from, has the right to express himself," he mutters in his friendly, slightly shambolic fashion. At 60, he is grizzled but still every inch the Hollywood legend. "People in the west talk of Africa, of poverty, of war and of sickness, but never of people who are conscious of what is happening. These issues resonate far beyond Africa. The structural violence that happens to people when they have no input in what happens to their lives resonates with people around the world."

Bamako is an unusual film: shot in the courtyard of a family home in the Malian capital, it uses a combination of professional and non- professional actors to conduct a court hearing in which ordinary Malians put the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on trial. As one witness after another takes the stand to testify to the everyday effects of international policy, ordinary life goes on in the background - women clean clothes in the yard, men chat lazily and a wife conducts an illicit affair.

The pace is slow, and the film can seem didactic. Yet, in contrast to the African-inspired films that have done so well around the world recently - The Last King of Scotland, Hotel Rwanda, The Constant Gardener, Blood Diamond - this is a genuinely African vision of the continent. The Africans we see in Bamako are active agents in their own lives. They may be poor, but they are acutely aware of their position in the world and the powers that perpetuate injustice.

"My objective in making this film was not necessarily to change things, but rather to bear witness to reality," says Sissako, an elegant man with a flash of silver in his short afro. "The people coming into the courtyard to be witnesses knew that they would not change their lives that day, but they got to say what they had to say.

"There is a perception in the west that African people are not aware of international politics. When the west talks of Africa, it talks of poverty, sickness, wars, but never talks of the people themselves having a view on what is happening. I wanted to show that African society may not be organised, but it is conscious."

Sissako is one of new African cinema's most significant talents. Trained in Moscow during the 1980s, he made his feature-film debut in 1998 with Life on Earth, a semi-autobiographical tale of an African who migrates from Mali to Paris. His second feature, Heremakono (Waiting for Happiness, 2002), was a similarly personal story. In Bamako, he takes on political issues for the first time. "There are many reasons why I chose to become a film-maker, but mainly I have always had this desire to tell the story of my environment," he says. "Gradually, what I've noticed is more and more injustice, so that is what I have addressed in Bamako."

This does not mean that the film, or, indeed, its director, buys in to western liberal ideas about what would be best for Africa. Rather, Sissako emphasises that Africans themselves should be put at the heart of thinking and decision-making about their continent. "This film will get a lot of attention from liberals, but liberalism sometimes gets it wrong despite its good intentions," he says. "For me, Europe, whether left-wing or right-wing, is united in its unfairness towards Africa. There has never been a policy of really sharing the wealth, and that goes beyond left and right. Europe is richer, stronger and has different politics. At times, it seems that Europeans feel a disdain towards the rest of the world."

When African cinema first began to flourish in the 1960s and 1970s, it was dominated by stridently political film-makers such as Senegal's Ousmane Sembène and the Egyptian Youssef Chahine. However, the economic ruin that followed the IMF policies of the 1980s seriously damaged the emerging film industry. Bamako marks a return of sorts to that original spirit; interestingly, Sembène and Chahine both had films shown at Cannes in 2004.

But even while interest in African film is growing in Europe, the industry at home still struggles. Sadly, although Bamako has got a general release in both France and Britain, it is less likely to be seen in Mali itself, where the number of cinemas has fallen from 40 to three since international financial institutions forced the state to sell cultural assets in the 1990s.

"There is no African cinema industry as such," says Sissako. "Films are rare and are made in only a few countries."

Inevitably, this factor influences the audience the director envisages for Bamako. However, he insists that it does not simply cater to a European audience. "I'd say that I make films both to be heard in the outside world, and to share experiences within Africa. I am telling Africa that it must express itself."

"Bamako" (certificate PG) will be in cinemas from 23 February

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