There’s an African film festival in Scotland

Africa in Motion, Scotland’s African Film Festival, kicks off in Edinburgh and Glasgow today. Here’s a selection of scheduled films which might as well double as our weekly “10 films to watch out for” series. The festival opens with the debut feature film from South African filmmaker, author and playwright Ndaba ka Ngwane, Uhlanga (“The mark”), set in KwaZulu-Natal:

In Yellow FeverNg’endo Mukii explores concepts of skin and race, using a mix of different media and interviews:

From AIM’s “African Films for Children” event: The Pepper Merchant, an episode of the Ethiopian animated children series which follows twins Abeba and Abebe. Below is another example of the many episodes available on the series’ YouTube channel:

Two from the short film competition. Moroccan director Lamia Alami’s Salam Ghourba (“Farewell exile”), a film from 2011, tells the story of Fatima, waiting for a letter from her husband who has migrated to France:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IZSNwtOsZ8

…and Who Killed Me, by Tanzanian director Amil Shivji, a short on the life (and death, I presume) of Hassan, a Congolese immigrant in Canada:

In the festival’s “Arab Spring Documentaries” section, there is Rouge Parole, a work of Elyes Baccar on the uprisings in Tunisia and their aftermath:

Granny’s Flags, a short by Naziha Arebi about Haja Fatma, a mother to eight children, considering freedom in Tripoli during the Libyan Revolution:

Also featuring in the Tripoli Stories series is The Secret Room by Ibrahim Y. Shebani about the caretaker for the National Museum of Libya:

Filed under “African Popular Arts” is Volker Goetze’s The Griot, the musician’s documentary on contemporary West African oral epics (I’ll watch any film which has Mamadou Diouf or Randy Weston as talking heads)…

…and Twende Berlin (“Let’s go to Berlin”), a documentary about Hip Hop group Ukoo Flani’s 2010 visit to Berlin — with some help of Nairobi’s Goethe-Institute project BLNRB (you remember their music videos):

Africa in Motion can also be found on Twitter and Facebook. It runs until 2 November. Full programme of scheduled films and events here. Saturday’s scholarly symposium looks good too.

Further Reading

After the uprising

Following two years of mass protest, Kenya stands at a crossroads. A new generation of organizers is confronting an old question: how do you turn revolt into lasting change? Sungu Oyoo joins the AIAC podcast to discuss the vision of Kenya’s radical left.

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.