Africa Is a Country

5 New Films to Watch Out For, N°29

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

5 New Films to Watch Out For, N°29

By
Tom Devriendt

Nègre Blanc (“White Negro”) is Cheikh N’diaye’s new film about albinism, in which he tackles rumors, stereotypes and misconceptions through the eyes of Cameroonian storyteller Léonard de Semnjock:

Sans Image (“Without Image”) is a French documentary film by Fanny Douarche and Franck Rosier about three sans-papiers from Mali (Matenin, Gaye and Abdoulaye) who work on a theatre piece that reflects their daily hustles as workers “without papers” in France:

Pokou, Princesse Ashanti is marketed as the first animated film coming out of Côte d’Ivoire — produced by Afrikatoon:

Christian Lajoumard’s documentary In the Courtyard of the Puppeteers of Burkina Faso is part of a mini-series about puppets from around the world. In Burkina Faso, a number of young puppeteers have revived this dying art, and today about twenty troops flourish in the country. These small enterprises with limited means usually set up shop in the courtyards of family homes:

La Rive Noire (“The Black River”) is a documentary by Blaise Ndjehoya (Cameroon) and Olivier Van’L — after historian Michel Fabre’s book by the same title — about the Transatlantic links (from Harlem to Paris) between African-American and African-French thinkers and artists at the beginning of the 20th century. Names and interviews include those of Aimé Césaire, Howard Dodson, Lilyan Kesteloot, Daniel Maximin, Gordon Parks, Herbert Gentry and Manuel Zapata Olivella:

Further Reading

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.

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.