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.
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.
Dancing the Twist in Bamako
Set in newly independent Mali, 'Dancing the Twist in Bamako' is neither propagandistically praiseful of socialism nor does it present it through a wholly negative lens.
More than a building
The film 'No Place But Here' uses VR or 360 media to immerse a viewer inside a housing occupation in Cape Town. In the process, it wants to challenge gentrification and the capitalist logic of home ownership.
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.
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.