Congolese (Brazzaville) filmmaker Rufin Mbou Mikima has uploaded* his latest documentary “Tsofa” to YouTube. The film tells the story of a group of Congolese men, many of them highly qualified university graduates who got offered a 600 euro/month job by a Romanian company to go and work as taxi drivers in Bucharest, the European country’s […]
The new “Africa Rising” narrative propagated largely by a globally-connected middle and upper class diaspora, often obscures the grittier stories of the African immigrant experience. This is partly due to an instinct among African immigrants to want to counter the history of one-dimensional and negative portrayals of both Africa and immigrants in the mainstream Western media. While […]
“Bon voyage” (“Have a nice trip”), a Swiss animated short movie by Fabio Friedli, seeks to convey how it feels to be an African asylum seeker in Switzerland, and it does so by capturing the experience in the simplest manner, with ballpoint pen and paper. Reactions to the movie show how divided the Swiss are […]
On a recent trip to Johannesburg (which is in Gauteng Province), a couple of friends decided to invade a Congolese restaurant in Yeoville; Kin Malebo on 31 Raleigh Street in Yeoville. The game was between DR Congo and Niger; I had access to a camera and decided to tag along. Good times were had by all.
Guest Post by Anonymous* If you follow current headlines, you may have noticed a seemingly new conflict arising in the Middle East. Recent migratory trends in Israel have led to new challenges beyond the decades long occupation of the Palestinian Territories. The tension surrounding the influx of African asylum seekers and refugees to Israel has […]
Towards the final scenes of Restless City, Jessye Norman’s solo soprano voice scales the great buildings and the conveyor belts of vehicles, between all of which a small red scooter navigates, carrying the slim bodies of Djibril and Trina. They are here, in this city, with all their desires clenched in their mouths. It is Norman’s voice, following the music composed by Richard Strauss to the poetry of Herman Hesse, that lifts our two immigrants’ desires up on the currents of her song, skylarks freed into the night sky.
Leo Goldsmith and Rachael Rakes, film editors at Brooklyn Rail, write about the documentary film “Imagining Emanuel” (trailer above), which recently played at the Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight in New York City:
I know we’re already seven days into March, but visual artist Michael Paul Britto’s request for ‘an extra day to be black’ in mainstream media outlets, still holds. (For those in the dark, he is ripping into Black History Month.)
It has come to this. Don’t focus too much on the ‘your scholarship’ line. An email from an American lawyer in my inbox: I am writing to request your help in a matter based on your scholarship on South Africa. My immigration law firm is currently representing a family of white Afrikaner farmers who are […]
Born in London to a Moroccan mother and an Iraqi father, Tala Hadid completed her 12-minute short thesis film Your Dark Hair Ihsan in 2005. Recorded in Morocco and its Rif Mountains, the film was awarded the Cinecolor/Kodak Prize (2005) and the Panorama Best short Film Award at the Berlin Film Festival (2006).
