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

Redrawing liberation

From Gaza to Africa, colonial cartography has turned land into property and people into populations to be managed. True liberation means dismantling this order, not redrawing its lines.

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.