Filmmaker Shannon Walsh teamed up with director and writer Arya Laloo to make Jeppe on a Friday, “a neighborhood documentary.” The setting is Jeppestown in Johannesburg, South Africa, chronicling a day in the lives of eight residents of this area on the brink of massive change. The featured residents are Beninese entrepreneurs Arouna and Zainab; […]
The Professor is a fiction film by Tunisian director Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud. Synopsis: Tunis 1977. Khalsawi Khalil, Professor of Constitutional Law is responsible to defend the official State’s position in a period of tension between the government and the Interntional League for Human Rights. One day, Khalil learns that Houda, one of his students with […]
Documentary filmmakers are better at spreading the word about their new work on the web compared to fiction directors, or there’s just more documentary films being made. (Or I’m looking in the wrong places.) Here are ten more films to watch out for. First, four fiction features: A Menina dos Olhos Grandes (“The girl with […]
Here’s another list of 10 films in the making or already finished. Two long fiction features to start with. Dakar Trottoirs (directed by Hubert Laba Ndao; left) has “surrealist characters of a paradoxical theatre intermingling in the heart of the city.” Sounds real. There’s a write-up on the shooting of the film and a short […]
And by ‘African’ we mean — made by African or diaspora directors, Africa-themed, or set in Africa. Don’t spend too much time pondering about that definition though. First up this week is Re-Emerging: The Jews of Nigeria, a documentary film (trailer above) by Jeff L. Lieberman about Nigerian Igbos who have adopted Judaism. (William Miles […]
I was surprised to find very few films by African directors in this year’s programme of the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam. At my count, 4 out of 317 — Samoute Andrey Diarra’s Sand Fishers, Karima Zoubir’s Woman with a Camera, Nadine Cloete’s Miseducation and Muhammad Taymour’s One Minute — but maybe I have […]
One of the reasons recently given by members of the local advisory committee to the responsible authorities for withholding much-needed subsidies to the Africa film festival in my home town was the question whether enough films were available. Yeh. Here are another ten films we’ll be looking out for.
Here are another 10 films we’re hoping to see in the (near) future. First, three “fiction” films. ‘Winter of Discontent’, a film by director Ibrahim El Batout is set against the backdrop of the 2011 Tahrir Square protests, zooming in on the the lives of activist Amr (Amr Waked), journalist Farah (Farah Youssef) and state […]
‘O Grande Kilapy’ (“The Great Kilapy” — ‘kilapy’ is Kimbundu for ‘scheme’, or ‘fraud’), the new film by director Zézé Gamboa, portrays the last decade of Portuguese rule in Angola through the story of Joao Fraga (played by Lazaro Ramos): The film’s facebook page has some clips. Also check this production video for the images […]
‘Grand comme le Baobab’ (“Tall as the baobab tree”) is a film told through the voice of Coumba (in Pular language), who tries to avoid her 11-year-old sister from being sold into marriage to settle a family debt in rural Senegal; shot mostly with a local cast.
