The American film critic J. Hoberman has said that Vittorio De Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves” is “the most universally praised movie produced anywhere on planet Earth.” The 1948 Italian neorealist film won an Oscar seven years before the Academy even had a category for foreign language films. It has also been called the apogee of the […]
We hardly ever feature Brazilian music, and even less their take on Afrobeat. The above tune by the Abayomy Afrobeat Orchestra dates from last year, but the video’s new. Hope to see more from them. We’ve got 9 more videos lined up for you this week. Ugandan duo Radio & Weasel came up with this:
Guest Post by Patrick Gathara At the end of my first term in high school, I watched a screening of Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist, the tale of an ordinary family unknowingly living in a house built over a graveyard without the bother of moving the bodies. Of course, this does not go down well with the […]
Guest Post by Mukoma Wa Ngugi In 1982, as the air force-led coup attempt in Kenya unfolded, we sat glued to our transistor radio listening to the BBC and Voice of America (VOA). In fact, the more the oppressive the Moi regime censored Kenyan media, the more Western media became the lifeline through which we learned […]
The Kenyan people have voted. The Kenyan elections have come and not quite gone. The foreign press offered its readers a veritable smorgasbord of dreadfully decontextualized representations, and now that the actual polling has passed, you can just about taste the collective disappointment at the absence of spectacular violence. As the local Kenyan press noted, […]
Apart from seeing our logo superimposed on a building in downtown Johannesburg, this is a good way to celebrate AIAC TV’s return to Youtube. We (well Dylan Valley) attended STR.CRD in Johannesburg last year. STR.CRD is South Africa’s leading (and maybe only) street culture festival and expo. Dylan sat down with Kenyan “geek afro pop” […]
Kenyans vote today (in some places voting have already started). And somehow, as in any election in any African country, the cliches are not far behind. “Will Kenya fall into mayhem after the results of the general elections are announced?” “Will one of (East) Africa’s most politically stable countries see a return of post-election violence […]
Kenya had its first ever televised presidential debate on Monday night. Like many others I was watching the livestream online and Tweeting while at it. I have included some of my real time tweets in this post (see below). A number of things stood out during the debate. The incumbent Prime Minister Raila Odinga—referred to […]
The public persona (and the politics) of Bob Marley, whose birthday it is today,* was heavily informed by his relationship with Africa (both symbolically and in a real sense). A good place to see that play out was in director Kevin MacDonald’s critically acclaimed film, “Marley,” where McDonald plays up that connection to full effect. […]
It interesting that the title of this video–shot recently by filmmaker Cary Fukunaga and commissioned by fashion brand Maiyet*–is “Sleepwalking in the Rift.” Not just alluding to dreaming, but also, because we are in the realm of genre here, to the film “I Dreamed of Africa.” The genre has its conventions. This reel, as with others in […]
