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.
Film
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.
KwaZulu-Natal Gothic
The crime drama 'Reyka' looks at violence in the troubled South African province.
Pull and I shall pull
Amil Shivji’s latest film, 'Vuta N’Kuvute,' is a gift, not only to the people of Tanzania, Zanzibar and its diasporas, but to the world.
So that the victims do not die a second time
To put an end to general indifference about the 25 years of political violence in DR Congo, filmmaker Thierry Michel chooses to show the worst atrocities and to name the war criminals.
A bracing form of political cabaret
'Neptune Frost,' written and co-directed by Saul Williams, knows that extraction is everyone’s problem.
We are all potential advocates
Director Shameela Seedat’s film about trainee lawyers provides a sort of celebration of youth on this continent and a vision of the next generation of Africans.
Resisting petty apartheid
The historian Premesh Lalu’s film about an apartheid-era cinema on the Cape Flats also offers a glimpse of a future beyond racism for South Africa.