• Coley Gray

A new documentary follows two women’s mission to decolonize Nairobi’s libraries, revealing how good intentions collide with bureaucracy, donor politics, and the ghosts of colonialism.

• Johan Gimonprez

The director of the Oscar-nominated film 'Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat' reflects on imperial violence, corporate warfare, and how cinema can disrupt the official record — and help us remember differently.

• Matene Toure

In 'Dahomey,' Mati Diop reimagines restitution, using surrealist cinema to revive looted African artifacts and amplify youth-led calls for decolonization.

• Dylan Haworth

Forty years ago, African filmmakers and revolutionaries united to reclaim cinema as a weapon for liberation and cultural sovereignty across the continent.

• Tsogo Kupa

A sweeping, jazz-scored exploration of Cold War intrigue and African liberation, Johan Gimonprez’s 'Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat' lays bare the cultural and political battlegrounds where empires, artists, and freedom fighters clashed.

• Fatoumata Bah

African postcolonial cinema serves as a mirror, revealing the limits of escape — whether through migration or personal defiance — and exposing the tensions between dreams and reality.

• Naima Kane

Mati Diop’s 'Dahomey' isn’t solely concerned with the subject of repatriating Beninese artifacts, but with returning the debate to the Beninese themselves.

• Idris Olakunle Ajao

An eye-opening documentary on African literary titan Wole Soyinka wants us to laud his “politics” without ever having Soyinka himself talk about them.

• Dino Knudsen

In a new film, former UN-Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld is portrayed as a defender of a fledgling postcolonial state. But his role in the Congo Crisis is more complicated.

• Daniel Okechukwu

Bolanle Austen-Peters' new biopic on Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti often feels too simple and safe.

• Tsogo Kupa

As Africa’s first filmmakers made their unique steps in Africanizing cinema, few were as bold as Djibril Diop Mambéty who employed cinema to service his dreams.

• Tsogo Kupa

At the 31st New York African Film Festival, young filmmakers set the stage with adventurous and varied experiments in African cinema.

• Kristen Harding

By centering the African migrant perspective, a new film challenges Western images that cast hundreds of thousands of individuals into the generic role of desperation.

• Londiwe Gamedze

The film adaptation of Percival Everett's novel ‘Erasure’ leaves little room to explore Black middle-class complicity in commodifying the traumas of Black working-class lives.

• Mariam Ben Slama

To see Kaouther Ben Hania’s latest film as condoning the West’s orientalism is to to ignore the agency of the women in it.

• Sean Henry Jacobs
• Kathryn Mathers

Why are stories about African suffering so persistent?

• Arthur Musah

A new film follows the lives of four African students at MIT, where youthful idealism gets tested by the realities of American racism and inequality.

• Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda

The little-known history of Iranian cinema uncovers its overlooked history of slavery and anti-blackness.

• Brooks Marmon

A new film about American civil rights icon Bayard Rustin overlooks his later conservative turn, evident in his attitudes to anticolonial resistance in Africa.

• Steven W. Thomas

It would seem that Hollywood has discovered Africa again. But how does all the new American content about Africa’s past compare to a previous generation of African-made movies on the same topic?