http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg1IHGKPoQg

‘A Game’ is a short fiction film from 2010 by Sudanese director Marwa Zein, based on Italian novelist Alberto Moravia’s story ‘Let’s play a game’. Zein is one of the ‘Arab Women Filmmakers’ whose work will be screened and discussed at the Cervantes Institute in Berlin (with many of the directors attending). Other (older and new) films and directors are: Forbidden (Amal Ramsis), Kingdom of Women (Dahna Abourahme), Neither Allah, Nor Master (Nadia El Fani), Letter to my Sister (Habiba Djahnine), Damascus Roof and Tales of Paradise (Soudade Kaadan) and Lemon Flowers (Pamela Ghanimeh). A great selection. The series started earlier this week and runs till March 6. Details here. Trailer for the ‘festival’ here.

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.