Premiered at NY Film Festival There aren’t enough words in such a short space to do justice to this extraordinary piece of work. Abderrhamane Sissako, who won an Academy award for his film “Timbuktu”, directs an opera for the first time in his career, and award-winning director Charles Castello makes a documentary about the rehearsals. […]
A short documentary showing the beautiful mountain wilderness of St Catherine in the Sinai desert, a holy place which has always been on the path of the prophets as they crossed between Israel and Egypt, and now a centre of herb and plant research as well as a sanctuary. […]
Ousmane Sembene Short Film Award, 2021; Los Angeles Cinematography Award 2020; Nomination: Africa Movie Academy Award for Best Diaspora Documentary This short film explores the origins of a mysterious Kenyan object that has been found in the archives of a German museum. The only information about it is that it entered the museum in 1903; […]
Best documentary, 7th Rustenburg FF; Calgary Black FF; Halifax Black FF In 1988, Dulcie September, a member of the ANC living in Paris, was assassinated as she entered an elevator at her apartment building. The murderer was never found and the crime never investigated properly. Now, in 2021 director Enver Samuel has made a powerful […]
Special Jury Recognition, and honours for 10 episodes at Jackson Wild Media Festival, USA We have selected three documentaries together from a unique and inspiring wildlife documentary series, Wildlife Warriors, made for Kenyan TV by a Kenyan film crew and local conservationists, and hosted by award-winning conservationist Paula Kahumbu. Each episode in the series showcases […]
Nominee for Golden Eye, Cannes Houlaye is a 12-year-old girl who lives in the small semi-nomadic settlement of Tatis in Niger, in the region of the Sahel, an arid belt of land running between the Sahara and the tropical zone whose population and livestock is increasingly threatened by climate change and water crisis. Every day […]
Traditional storyteller and filmmaker Valerio Lopes, from Cape Verde, has created this highly original, a futuristic documentary on African history, science, and technology. Using both traditional story-telling in its role as a carrier of culture, tradition, and belief, computer graphics, and the results of his own research from the 16 African countries he has visited, […]
Premiered at Berlin IFF Akuol is the daughter of Rebecca de Mabior, and both are subjects of this very personal film about the family’s connections with the formation of South Sudan and her mother’s continuing vital role in its leadership. Akuol was 16 when her father, leader of the South Sudanese Liberation Movement, was killed […]
An insightful study of over 40 years of an interracial marriage between a Ghanaian and a German offers many different views on the politics of African-European marital relationships. The couple’s children recount the history of their marriage from when they first met in England post-WW2, to their later years and the legacy they left their […]
Best Musical Film Cannes 2021, selected at Harlem IFF 2022 Filmed before the pandemic struck France, this is a tribute to Manu Dibango, one of the great icons of African music who died of Covid in 2020. In the five years or so before his death the film records and reveals Manu in all his […]
Old women play Rock ‘n Roll! In the last 40 years, the pioneering Hasna elBecharia has brought about a small revolution in Algerian traditional Gnawa music. Originally the preserve of the men of the Gnawa culture of ex-southern slaves in Algeria, Gnawa has been taken over by women, led by the indomitable 60-somethingHasna. The documentary […]
Four ethnographers led by Marcel Griaulefrom the Paris Museum of Mankindtravel on a famous/infamous expedition from west to east across 1930’s Africa, with the express idea of gathering traditional artifacts from the supposedly ‘dying cultures they encounter en route. Thus they rationalise the buying and stealing of the people’s sacred objects for exhibit back in […]
