This is what they don’t want you to know
A new film on the life of Walter Rodney gives a glimpse of his radical solidarity politics and centers on his family, who struggled and suffered with him.
Film
Imagining counter-futures
The film 'Neptune Frost' reduces the gulf between Africanfuturism and Afrofuturism by connecting their shared vision against violent systems of domination.
The cemetery of cinema
Thierno Souleymane Diallo’s latest film traces his search for what is likely the first film made by a Guinean, in the process asking: how is a film culture possible when the infrastructure and institutions are lacking?
The phenomenological real
A book by writer Melissa Thackway and director Jean-Marie Teno highlights an ethical and politically engaged partnership between filmmaker and film critic.
Emancipation that costs servitude
Filmmaker Khady Sylla amplifies the voices of and gives visibility to the domestic workers tending to the homes of Africa’s middle classes.
The dust, towers and false promises of modern Ethiopia
Successive Ethiopian governments have continued a 'modernizing' project that not only offers people false dreams, but actively dislocates them from the things that gave them purpose in the past.
Porters of colonial legacies
By looking through the lenses of Brussels’ diverse youth, 'The Porters' questions the ways Belgium fails to deal with its colonial past.
Where the spirits conquer her
The Senegalese director, Safi Faye’s classic 1996 film, Mossane, is a love tragedy and a spiritual quest in Sereer land.
The colonial wounds of Senegal’s girlchild
In ‘Black Girl’ (1966) and ‘Cuties’ (2020), M'Bissine T. Diop is a cautionary figure who warns of colonialism's wounds and afterlives for Black girl belonging in the present day.
The land doesn’t lie
Safi Faye's 1976 film, 'A Farmer's Love Letter,' exposes the gap between the post-colonial state and the concerns of ordinary people.
To create or to perish
The last film of underappreciated Senegalese director, Khady Sylla dealt with mental health. It is worth revisiting it now for its groundbreaking portrayal of depression suffered by two women friends.
The revenge of the subalterns
The second 'Black Panther' film is a fierce critique of the West's (neo)colonial adventures in Africa and the Americas.
Mothers and mothering
Director Alice Diop’s 'Saint Omer' is preoccupied with what binds women together, the traumas that are inherited, shared and possibly overcome.
The balancing act of being African and an artist
In the documentary film 'Abderrahmane Sissako, un cinéaste à l’Opéra,' the director is in complete control of his artistic vision.
After we have grown too tired of jumping
The Ghanaian game, Ampe, is an education in Blackness and womanhood.
Sembene’s Africa is everyone’s Africa
If someone had to hold the title of father of African cinema, Ousmane Sembéne would be the most compelling candidate.
The haunting draw of the West
To be African means at some point to desire to leave. African cinema can provide solace for our tortured relationship to the West and our own continent.
Watching Naija
Nollywood makes more films than Hollywood and Bollywood. What it lacks is strong marketing and promotion.
The arc of the boomerang
More than class solidarity alone, more than a technocratic climate justice, a reckoning with empire is necessary for our collective survival.
A kingdom’s ransom
Although films like 'The Woman King' offer us a small glimpse into the past, they cannot give us the full story.