Between Turin, Dakar, and New York, Sophie, Abdoulaye and Thierno’s three destinies cross paths and echo one another, delineating a constellation of exile. Sophie, 24 years old, leaves Dakar to join her husband, Abdoulaye, in Turin. Meanwhile, Abdoulaye has already left for New York through a smuggler’s network. 19-year-old Thierno is travelling in Africa for […]
They Will Have To Kill Us First: Malian music in exile is a feature-length documentary following musicians in Mali in the wake of a jihadist takeover and subsequent banning of music. Music, one of the most important forms of communication in Mali, disappeared overnight in 2012 when Islamic extremists groups rose up to capture an […]
On South Africa’s stunning Wild Coast, the Pondo people have tended their traditional way of life for centuries. Nonhle, a young local eco-tour guide, is a staunch supporter of her people and the endangered environment on which their livelihood and culture depend. Her cousin Madiba, a local entrepreneur, is fully supportive of an Australian titanium-mining […]
Tribal masks are loaded with significance but must retain their mystery. Taking his cue from this, acclaimed director Jacques Sarasin has carved a film of great beauty, a voyage between magic and reality that explores with respect and potency the culture – and secrets – of the Bambara of Mali. At its heart is the […]
Stories of Our Lives began as an archive of testimonials from Kenyan persons who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex assembled by a small Nairobi-based multidisciplinary arts collective. So compelling were these stories that the ten-member association of artists, social workers and entrepreneurs was inspired to adapt some of them into short films. […]
In 1952, Ousmane Sembéne, a dockworker and fifth-grade dropout from Senegal, began dreaming an impossible dream: to become the storyteller for a new Africa. SEMBENE!, a feature-length documentary, tells the unbelievable true story of the “father of African cinema”, the self-taught novelist and filmmaker who fought, against enormous odds, a monumental, 50-year-long battle to give […]
With his mother in prison and nowhere to go except a welfare home, Benjamin, thirteen, insists on living with his unknown father, Karim, who, as he says bluntly to his grandfather, “had sex with my mother”. Karim still lives in the home of his parents, a family already traumatised by displacement and personal tragedy. They […]
Run is running away…he has just killed his country’s Prime Minister. Therefore he had to take the face and clothes of a madman wandering throughout the town for months. His life returns to him in flashes: his childhood with master Tourou, when he dreamt of becoming a rainmaker, his incredible adventures with Greedy Gladys and […]
From executive producer Angelina Jolie Pitt comes the award-winning drama Difret, based on the inspirational true story of a young Ethiopian girl and a tenacious lawyer embroiled in a life-or-death clash between cultural traditions and their country’s advancement of equal rights. When 14-year-old Hirut is abducted in her rural village’s tradition of kidnapping women for […]
In a vibrant and diverse Johannesburg community, 21-year-old Afro-hipster Ayanda has a knack for taking neglected pieces of furniture and “bringing them back to love”. Eight years after her father’s death, she is determined to revive his prized garage business, which is in deep debt and in danger of being sold. The film crackles with […]
The first major work of Senegalese director Ousmane Sembéne, this 1966 film is widely recognised as one of the founding works of African cinema. What starts out as a deceptively simple story about a young Senegalese woman, Diouana, who works as a nanny, and whose hopes of an exciting life in France are dashed when […]
