10 African films to watch out for, N°4

Here are another 10 films we’re hoping to see in the (near) future. First, three “fiction” films. ‘Winter of Discontent’, a film by director Ibrahim El Batout is set against the backdrop of the 2011 Tahrir Square protests, zooming in on the the lives of activist Amr (Amr Waked), journalist Farah (Farah Youssef) and state security officer Adel (Salah Alhanafy):

‘Kedach Ethabni’ (“How Big Is Your Love”) is a film by Algerian director Fatma Zohra Zamoum probing “tradition and modernity” through the lives of a three-generation family in Algiers. An English-subtitled trailer here and an interview with the director here.

‘Black South-Easter’ by director Carey McKenzie, starring Tony Kgoroge, is set in Cape Town and tells a story of police corruption. I’m told it has a very good soundtrack too. No trailer yet.


And seven documentaries:

‘Babylon’ is a film by Ismaël Chebbi, Youssef Chebbi and Ala Eddine Slim. In the aftermath of its own revolution, Tunisia received an influx of displaced persons from Libya, who got housed in camps. The film traces, without any voice-over commentary, the construction and closure of one such camp. A fragment:

(Three more fragments here.)

‘Noire ici, Blanche là-bas’ (“Black here, White there”) is an addition to the growing diasporic body of recent and very personal films about the searching for one’s roots. Born in Congo to a French father and a Congolese mother, and having moved to France at a young age, Claude Haffner films her own ongoing quest, returning to and visiting relatives in Mbuji-Mayi. No English trailer yet:

Philippa Ndisi-Herrmann is working on a documentary about the development of “Africa’s largest port” on the island of Lamu, off the Kenyan coast. We Want Development (but at what cost?)

In ‘Our Bright Stars’, a film directed by Sidi Moctar Khaba and Frédérique Cifuentes, various people from South Sudan share their expectations of the new nation:

François Ducat and Frank Dalmat have made a documentary about Zimbabwean music band Mokoomba (‘d’une rive à l’autre’; “from one [river] bank to the other”):

(Here’s another fragment.)

In ‘One Day in the Madrassa’, filmmaker Youssef Ait Mansour goes on a journey to meet his brother who has chosen to live in a secluded madrassa in the Moroccan desert:

And, also set in Morocco, ‘Bahr Nnass’ (“Sea of Tears”) by director Marouan Bahar is a critical film that follows a seaweed-digging diver as she struggles to make ends meet for her family:

* Our previous new films round-ups: part 1, part 2 and part 3.

Further Reading

On Safari

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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.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.