Seeking fantasies across the sea
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.
Film
Writing while black
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.
More than just victims
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.
When I say Africa
Why are stories about African suffering so persistent?
Being young and African in elite America
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.
Weaving the unthought
The little-known history of Iranian cinema uncovers its overlooked history of slavery and anti-blackness.
Bayard Rustin’s Zimbabwe
A new film about American civil rights icon Bayard Rustin overlooks his later conservative turn, evident in his attitudes to anticolonial resistance in Africa.
Where is African cinema in Hollywood?
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?
Baloji’s synaesthetic universe
The return of Belgian-Congolese multitalent Baloji is nothing short of remarkable, with his latest output offering a fourfold album, an immersive exhibition, and most notably, a captivating magic realistic film.
Not that complex
A new HBO documentary exposes the harm caused by unqualified aid workers in Uganda, but its attempts to complicate the narrative ultimately fall flat.
Loving, living, and communal duty
Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s directorial debut is not only a love story about two star-crossed individuals, but about the whimsical landscapes of the place where they fall in love.
The committed cameraman
New films from Mila Turajlić salvages footage from the Yugoslavian news archives to tell a story of non-aligned internationalism against Cold War bipolarity.
A tragic kind of hope
Nigerian and South Sudanese filmmakers give voice to the search for identity, stability, and belonging through the lens of youth and migration.
The specter of homophobia
How does it feel to be gay in an environment where homophobia is mundane and rampant, and where gays are silenced, ridiculed, and assaulted in everyday life?
Don’t consume what you sell
A new film by Ery Claver probes the fraught relationship between China and Angola, revealing their differences—and surprising similarities.
Não consuma o que você vende
Um novo filme de Ery Claver investiga a tensa relação entre China e Angola, revelando suas diferenças—e surpreendentes semelhanças.
Memory and forgetting
Almost 30 years since South Africa’s first democratic elections, apartheid can sometimes seem like a distant past. However, three new films interrupt both the temptation to forget and to selectively remember.
Cinematic universality
Fatou Cissé’s directorial debut meditates on the uncertain fate and importance of Malian cinema amidst the growing dismissiveness towards the humanities across the world.
Saved by memory
A new Brazilian film shows the role memory plays in African spirituality and dreams of liberation.
The empire of words
The fiction of Senegalese writer and filmmaker Khady Sylla not only used speech to create worlds and ways of being in the world, but used speech as a world and a character in its own right.