Africa Is a Country

Tribeca Film Festival

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Tribeca Film Festival

By
Sean Jacobs

I am tired of doing this. Because it is getting predictable. The top-heavy and scattered Tribeca Film Festival starts tomorrow. There’s three Africa-related films on the schedule (correct me if my research was shoddy): a short from South Africa (“Father Christmas doesn’t come here“), a documentary about Rwanda’s genocide and a film that looks like being about the midlife crisis of an American in Cairo (above). There’s also two other films in which Africa is a part-focus (on deaths in child birth and on climate change). I know. Even worse, this is the fourth year (?) that Tribeca decided to partner with ESPN to show sports films. If you’re wondering there’s one sports film with a soccer theme: a film about the connection between the murders of the Colombian drug dealer, Pablo Escobar, and the football player, Andres Escobar, who was murdered 10 days after he scored an own goal for Colombia against the US in the 1994 World Cup.  I know. It had to have something to do with the US. Oh, and these are films already shown as part of ESPN’s 30th year anniversary on television.

Further Reading

Who deserves the city?

Colonial urbanism cast African neighborhoods as chaotic, unplanned, and undesirable. In postcolonial Dar es Salaam, that legacy still shapes who builds, who belongs, and what the middle class fears the city becoming.

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.