Burkina Faso

Plot: Mamadi is struggling to complete a doctorate at a Parisian university after the government of his country has stopped paying his scholarship. Thanks to his acquaintances in the African community, he finds a job as night watchman in an underground car park. There, a French colleague, Franck, helps the friendly African academic getting around. However, the car park is also a meeting point for dubious characters, and when Mamadi accidentally wrecks a drug trafficking operation, Franck is really hard-pressed to put his pal and himself out of harm’s way. Wouldn’t Mamadi’s home country be the ideal place to escape the gangsters’ wrath?Read More »

Four women from different regions develop friendships during a bus journey across West Africa, as they accomplish an everyday journey while facing the universal challenge of being independent women.Read More »

Sarrouina (Keïta), a young warrior queen of the Azna tribe well-schooled in the arts of herbalism and warfare, leads her people to victory against a neighboring tribe. But the real trial of strength for her comes when the French army marches south to widen its colonial grip on the African continent. The second half of the film focuses on the French, acidly but plausibly satirized as little tyrants whose megalomania swells in proportion with their failure to grasp the realities of the culture they are trying to crush. Grounded in careful historical research, Sarraounia is a superbly crafted and expansive film that strikes a celebratory, assertive tone.Read More »

Quote:
A simple story about the status of old people in African society told with amazing grace”. A small african village. Bila, a ten year old boy who befriends an old woman, Sana. Everybody calls her ‘Witch’ but Bila himself calls her ‘Yaaba’ (grandmother). When Bilas cousin Nopoko gets sick it is Sana’s medicin who rescues her.Read More »

From the New York Times review:
“In “Sankofa,” a contemporary African-American woman travels back in time and experiences slavery. Haile Gerima’s poetic and precisely detailed film takes its audience into its heroine’s life and mind as her moral sense is challenged and changed. No viewer can avoid the discomforting questions the film so eloquently raises.

The opening sequences, set and filmed in Ghana, are alternately seductive and off-putting. Among drums and chants, a voice invokes ancestral ghosts. “Spirit of the dead, rise up,” the voice says, “and claim your story.” The film’s title is a West African term meaning to reclaim the past in order to go forward, and “Sankofa” stumbles only in its depiction of the present.Read More »