African Cinema

Through interviews as intimate as they are disconcerting, we meet Delphine, a Cameroonian immigrant residing in Belgium who narrates her life for the camera of Rosine Mbakam, also originally from Cameroon. As in her previous feature film “At Jolie Coiffure” (awarded at Olhar ’19), concise elements become a cinematographic force based on the encounter between black women all at once close and distant. The protagonist’s confessional tone reveals her self-awareness as the conductor of her own story, dealing with patriarchal and colonial scars and striving to assert her own voice.Read More »

A woman poses. A man with a camera zeros in on her and takes a picture. But very soon, the shoot degenerates. Each click of the camera sounds like a machine gun. No-one speaks; the editing is disrupted, and with it, the images, the spaces and the timing. The woman escapes. In an abandoned building, a man, as mute as she is, shrinks from her gaze. It is he that the film now follows: he explores a museum exhibiting the history of Africa, its suffering and its external interferences.Read More »

An enchanting and humorous blend of music, fable, and melodrama, Tajouj has become a classic of African cinema, the first Sudanese feature film and also the debut film of Gadalla Gubara. The story of a forbidden love triangle among the nomadic Beja people of the Eastern Desert in 19th-century Sudan, Tajouj stars Salah Ibn Albadya, a nationally beloved performer best known for his mystical Sufi and romantic ballads.Read More »

Plot Synopsis:
Dôlè offers a Gabonese perspective on the global crisis facing today’s youth. This film reveals that, whether in Libreville or in our own inner cities and suburbs the underlying causes of youthful disaffection can be remarkably similar.
Dôlè provides one of the most affectionate and affecting portraits of African youth poised precariously on the cusp of modernity. It has already been widely compared to François Truffaut’s iconic coming of age film – a kind of ‘Le quatre cents coups’ in Gabon.Read More »

Hundreds of young revolutionaries take to the streets of Kinshasa when Joseph Kabila, President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, refuses to relinquish power at the end of his second term. Protests are met with violence, but the battle for free elections and democracy cannot be repressed.
Quote:
Sidestepping conventional approaches to narrative, Kinshasa Makambo is a ground-level account of collective action told with blistering immediacy. With his attentive, perceptive camera, Dieudo Hamadi takes to the streets for an urgent portrait of young Congolese protestors fighting for democracy.Read More »

Quote:
This is certainly the first African film to tackle the problem of street children and drugs. Idrissa is a rebellious little boy who drops out of school and joins a gang of hooligans that live on the beaches of Dakar. He gradually becomes detached from his family and adopted by his new friends who initiate him into the art of theft and the pleasures of yamba, marijuana. In his new role as a “tough guy”, Idrissa becomes Boy Idi and begins to push joints. Everybody seems to smoke in Dakar. “Even respectable people do it”, says one of the small drug pushers. Whilst Idrissa’s father loses interest in the fate of his son, his mother decides to go to the police and an inspector sets off to hunt down the gang.Read More »

A forestry engineer pushes for reforestation measures, against the will of his selfish superiors, and embarks on a search for a mystical healing plant linking him with the ancestral knowledge of his people.Read More »

Synopsis:
In 1992, Nabil Ayouch directed Les Pierres bleues du désert, a first short film with Jamel Debbouze which tells the history of a convinced young man that there are large blue stones in the desert.Read More »

A fight between an Imam and his powerful brother over their children’s marriage. At stake: how a small community slowly drifts towards extremism.Read More »