An Introduction to African Cinema, 10 films from 10 countries

After majoring in film studies in university and having dedicated hundreds, if not thousands, of hours to watching movies to fulfill the unquenchable, almost uncontrollable, passionate desire to devoir as much cinema as possible, I am ashamed to say that before writing this post that my knowledge of African cinema was extremely limited, having only seen The Battle of Algiers, the ageless classic about the Algernian revolution, filmed in Algeria, but directed by an Italian, and Neill Blomkamp’s South African Oscar nominated social sci-fi phenomenon District 9. Both films are brilliant, but I had not even scraped the surface of the diverse African cinema waiting to be discovered. The Western World in general is obsessed with American and European films, with Japan’s national cinema being one major non Western exception whose output is widely seen and studied, but going out of your comfort zone can be highly rewarding, and this is proven not only by this list, but also by the films by such auteurs as South Korea’s Bong Joon Ho, Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami, India’s Satyajit Ray, Argentina’s Lucretia Martel, and countless others. In this post I have assembled ten films from ten different countries ranging from 1958 to 2019, and if one thing is certain, it is that we are only going to be seeing more African films as the years go on as many young directors, especially women directors, are just beginning to break out onto the international scene. While the films listed here are diverse, one can see trends that run through this selection of African cinema that deal with colonialism, revolution, violent dictatorships and political unrest, gender inequality, and superstition. There is also a special attention paid to rural communities, which leads to incredible opportunities to spotlight the amazing African landscapes. One image that is present in most, if not all of the films, is that of the burning orange sun, a sun that seems completely different from that that rises and sets in other parts of the world. One reason that audiences from the Western World, myself included, have not seen so many of these films is because of the difficulty to access them. Despite this challenge, it is well worth the trouble to seek them out, and hopefully, as films become more available online, these films will be easier to access for the wide audience they deserve.

Egypt, Cairo Station 1958, Youssef Chahine

Cairo Station is a Neorealist thriller, something like a mix between a film by De Sica and Hitchcock. It tells the story of a handicapped man, Qinawi, played by the director himself, who works selling newspapers at the Cairo train station and is infatuated with sex, and one woman in particular, Hanuma, who works illegally selling sodas in the train cars. But the object of his lust is engaged to be married to another worker in the station, a porter named Abu Siri. The film works partly as a proletariat workers film as Abu Siri fights against the boss of the station to create a union and make sure all employees are guaranteed fair and safe conditions. It’s aesthetic is also heavily influenced by Italian Neorealism in its captivating on location shots of the station and trains and the deed focus black and white photography that gives the film a real sense of time and place. However, it is also a genre thriller, and the black and white cinematography also lends itself perfectly to a type of film noirish lighting and ambiance. Qinawi, two years before Psycho was released, is a Norman Bates type, sexually repressed peeping Tom. Hateful of his condition and his inability to attract women, he begins to hate the exact person he so longs for and turns violent. It is a wonderfully atmospheric mismash of genres whose dirty realism breaks from the cleaner, richer Hollywood standard picture, and whose daring sexually tormented depiction of the human psyche combine to make a wonderful social thriller.

Angola, Sambizanga 1972, Sarah Maldoror

Sarah Maldoror’s revolutionary film from 1972 opens and closes with a beautiful overhead shot of strong waves beating against the shore, and a beating is exactly what is depicted in the story that is to follow as the oppressive Portugese colonialists ruthlessly crack down on any type of independent resistance. Maldoror is a black French director who studied film in Russia, worked on the classic The Battle of Algiers, the prototype for the African fight for independence film, and married a revolutionary from Angola. Needless to say, her filmmaking style has hints of the Soviet communist editing style, but also mixes in neorealism by using nonactors to film a dramatic personal story about a couple’s tragedy at the beginning of the Angolan war for independence. The film follows Maria, a woman who lives in the countryside whose husband Domingos is arrested without explanation from their home. She is accompanied by a hauntingly mournful Portugese ballad about someone in ‘camiño’ to their love. She goes on a tiring quest, with her baby packed on her back, from her home to the city where he is supposedly held. She walks, gets a lift, and then walks some more before she is told by bureaucrats to move from prison to prison because her husband is not there.Behind bars Domingos, her enormous, masculine, muscular, construction worker husband is being beaten to death as he refuses to snitch on his comrades. The characters are all delicately, realistically portrayed, from the lame man who sits near the prison, to the young, handsome, bright, smiling revolutionary, to the mother preparing lunch for her family and talking about how her son ‘broke his arm fishing,’ to Maria’s hopeless, exhausted, devastated mother and husband, to Domingos loving affable father turned bruised and beaten political prisoner. The tragic ending gives the audience a sense of hope as the revolutionaries celebrate the death of a fallen comrade by swallowing their tears and continuing the party, dancing even more energetically and full of life than before. From the opening shots of images of strapping workers breaking rocks edited in the style of Sergei Eisenstein, to the final declaration of battle, Sambizanga is as politically invigorating as it is emotionally moving. Perhaps the saddest part of the film is to watch Maria interact with the black police officers. She slaps one and accuses him of working with the whites. She rejects their helpful suggestions, and deep down we know by looking at their face, that no matter how much they help this one particular woman, that their conscience will forever be tormented by their collaboration.

Senegal, Touki Bouki 1973, Djibril Diop Mambéty

This Godardian inspired film is considered one of the best in African history. In a continent riddled with countries with a sparse cinematic output, Senegal, on the contrary, boasts a respected national cinema that began in the 1960s with the films of auteur Ousmane Sembène and continues today as exemplified with Mati Diop’s brilliant Palme d’or nominated political zombie film Atlantique. Touki Bouki takes it’s style directly from the French New Wave, and is a kind of Senegalese, anticolonialist, Pierrot le Fou. It begins and ends with a young boy leading a herd of cows through the sandy orange fields to the slaughter house. This boy will grow up to be Mory, a young man who sports the horns from the skull of one of these animals on his motorcycle, bringing his rural background directly into city life. Mory and his girlfriend Anta spend the duration of the film cheating and stealing their way to find a way to send themselves to France on a ferry and begin a life of promise on the European continent. Djibril Diop Mambéty uses an artistic, nonlinear, noncommercial aesthetic style to bring his story to the screen. The outrageous performances, bright costumes, the bizarre occurrences topped off with the repetitive sarcastic playing of an intentionally annoying song, ‘Paris, Paris,’ a song that represents the overly positive and ultimately mythical and imaginary idea of what Europe is, combine to make a harsh political parody. In the end Mory’s horned motorcycle suffers a similar fate to the brutally massacred beasts it imitates. Leaving Senegal is living a wonderful European life is more a fantasy than a reality even in this absurd film.

Burkina Faso, Yaaba 1989, Idrissa Ouedraogo

Idrissa Ouedraogo is one of Africa’s most well recognized and respected filmmakers with many of his films debuting and winning awards at international film festivals such as Cannes and Berlin. Yaaba, possibly his most popular film, is about a young boy from a poor rural village who develops a friendship with an old woman named Sana, an outsider in the village and thought by the villagers to be a witch. Like many of the films on the list, Yaaba is a social realist drama that features children as its protagonists. It subtly touches on themes like superstition, sexism, and disease in the Burkina Faso countryside, but many of its characters are too one dimensional and stereotypical to be believable: the benevolent alcoholic, the overly stern father, and the gentle, wise mother. However, despite its characters’ flaws, the film gives us a wonderful look into the world inhabited by them. The small walled village in the middle of nowhere with homes made out of clay, the barren, orange-brown soil with the occasional, seemingly lifeless, tree whose shape violently grasps towards the sky as if trying to claw water from it, and the brownish muddy rivers and ponds whose waves reflect the rays of a red-yellow sun is all wonderfully captured by Ouedraogo’s camera.  His use of the long shot during dance sequences, a very poignant burial, and the mirroring opening and closing shots of the two children protagonists playfulling chasing each other across the flat dusty landscape, expertly bring to life the films harshly beautiful natural setting while also projecting emotions that range from elation to sadness to a sense of pure freedom and innocence. Some of the actors are better than others, which can be expected in an untrained cast, but the performances by Noufou Ouédraogo as the young boy Bila and Fatimata Sanga as the old woman Sana are truly remarkable for their naturalness and effortlessness. Bila is a young, strong, playful, and altogether good young boy, and Sana’s fragile yet elegant body and shaved head with a toothless yet wise and kind face are the real reason the film remains a classic.

Mali, Yeelen 1989, Souleymane Cissé

Yeelen, which translates to ‘brightness’ or ‘light,’ also offers a fantastically beautiful view of the African landscape, this time in Mali, and, instead of using it’s epic natural beauty to depict a realist story of rural life, it uses it to great effect as the backdrop for a mythological legend. The film is about a young man, Nianankoro, who must flee from his father, Soma, a magician who uses the power of the ‘Komo,’ magic which is physically represented by a long pole that he prays to, uses to sacrifice chickens, and is carried on the shoulders of two barely clothed men who, possessed by its power, are dragged along by the pole’s guidance through the countryside by Soma’s vengeful demands. There is no doubt that the magic featured in the film is real, with hyena faced prophets, bee attacks, fortune telling, miraculous births, and body freezing powers all present. Almost all the dialogue spoken is spoken in parables. At times Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings come to mind, but here the sets are all real. Mali serves as our transport to a fantasy world that is a mirror of a real place. And while science fiction and fantasy films are always based in some way on reality, Yeelen, as a legend, is even more so. Nianankoro finds his uncle near the end of the film who warns him of slavery that will come for the future generations, but that the Bombara people will eventually prosper. Nianankoro travelling and helping people from other villages who speak other languages, and the ultimate message of sharing the light and not keeping it from others surely have deeper meanings that people more familiar with the culture, history, and politics of Mali will surely understand better than me. Western audiences may not catch the meaning of all the symbology, but the film is a feast for the eyes. Director Souleymane Cissé’s protagonists travel through deserts, swamps, mountains, and waterfalls from sunrise to sunset as a mother prays for his sun’s safety as she bathes waist deep in bright green reeds, a prodigal son walks through the soft red duns carrying a bright white egg as the small dust covered sun smokily blazes in the background, and our beautiful young protagonists cleanse themselves in a pure waterfall with mystical origins as explained by tale and science. While the men may be the protagonists, the woman characters are powerful, wise presences that lead their children safely forward towards their destiny, and without whom all would be lost. It is a film of fantastic storytelling and imagery that uses the mythology of the past to reflect on the present and the future.

Chad, Abouna 2002, Mahamat Saleh Haroun

Abouna is a social realist drama about two brothers whose lives are turned upside down after their father deserts their family. It is a quiet, calm film that despite its tragic events, never delves into melodrama. The two boys, Tahir, a teenager and Amine, a young boy, are beautifully portrayed by Ahidjo Mahamat Moussa and Hamza Moctar Aguid respectfully. Dressed throughout the film in the same bright orange and blue shirts, they travel through the dusty landscape in search of their father. Their exhausted mother, overwhelmed by their misbehavior, sends them to a Muslim school in the countryside where they are strictly educated and struggle to integrate. The film moves with a natural flow, and even the tragic events occur with a sort of sad acceptance as the protagonists advance forward with a determined mindset. The film is not perfect. A scene of quick forgiveness and the inclusion of a deaf mute love interest are a bit disappointing or unbelievable, but the rest of the film is so touching that it makes up for it. Haroun has a special affinity for framing using entrances, doors, and windows, and incorporating the architecture of the surroundings into his shots that become real visual poetry. This is particularly present in a heartbreaking moment when, instead of showing us what happens, Haroun films a brown clay window lit with dark blue light as if it was day turning into night, with the sound of a woman howling in pain overwhelming the soundtrack. It is a powerful moment that speaks stronger than a straight forward depiction of the scene would have. For all the horrible events of the films, it is very life affirming in its silent and meditative runtime, and ends with a glimmer of hope.

Mauritania, Waiting on Happiness 2002, Abderrahmane Sissako

Abderrahmane Sissako is perhaps the most important African director currently working after his wonderful film Waiting on Happiness made a splash at the Cannes film festival in 2002. He returned to the Cote d’Azure in 2017 with Timbuktu, an outstanding look at Issis’ effect on the city of its title, which went on to be nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film. Waiting on Happiness is a curious, amazingly poetic, yet ungraspable, film that I have not been able to get out of my head. It does not so much have one plot, as it has 3, 4, 5 or more, some of which don’t seem to have a beginning, an end, or either of the two. It is a wonderful look at life in a small coastal town of Mauritania. An adorable young boy helps an old man who used to be a fisherman and is now an electrician. A gorgeous young man comes back to the town to visit his mother before he moves to France; living away from home, this young man no longer can speak his mother tongue and finds it impossible to reintegrate himself back into society. A girl learns how to sing with a middle aged woman. A man awkwardly takes photos with his friends and festively says goodbye before going to Europe. A woman explains the tragic story of the loss of her daughter. An Asian man sings karaoke to a young smiling African young woman. As these stories wisp past the viewers eyes there are moments of fantastical cinematography as a man is in a room dressed in the exact same fabric that covers the walls and the sofa he sits on, in another scene he watches the small window in the floor and the feet that walk past it as if it were a television. A light refuses to work despite the fact that the cords and the bulb are perfectly fine. A radio disappears after it is buried. And throughout the film the multicolored fabrics hung on the close lines blow in the wind and the sound of the nearby ocean dominates the soundtrack. Sissako’s framing could not be more perfect as he inhabits the screen with the sandy ground and buildings and splashes of color from fabric, clothes, and the sea. It is an enjoyably enigmatic film that almost demands repeat viewings, a proposition I look forward to carrying out.

Ethiopia, Teza 2008, Haile Gerima

Teza is a devastating film that chronicles the political unrest in Ethiopia, from explaining the violent revolution against the Italians, the victims of which are honored by a monument on a place called Mussolini mountain, to the Derg period where a socialist dictatorship brutally murdered and imprisoned thousands of its own people. Unrest in Ethiopia continues today, as the country is a tragic example, of which there are several in Africa, of countries in a constant state of revolution as bands try to overthrow each other, the political situation never having successfully recovered from their colonialist oppressors. Our eyes and ears through the constant upheavals is Anberber, a young intellectual solcialist doctor who goes to East Germany to study and returns to see that the constant fighting in the name of the so called ‘revolution’ prevents him from doing his job as a doctor and helping and curing people whose lives can be easily saved. Anberber sees death all around him, and is threatened by racist Germans, both sides fighting in Ethiopia, and cannot find peace even in his rural village where he is in danger by violent superstitious neighbors. The film features countless shots of the sun rising over an expansive, peaceful lake, as if Anberber watches it everyday in the hope that the sun will cast its light upon an Ethiopia that has finally stopped fighting. Gerima’s editing style certainly takes its influence from the Sovient directors before him, as he constantly cuts, offering various shots of the same image instead of lingering on one long take.

Zambia, I am not a Witch 2017, Rungano Nyoni

Two African women directors have broken into the international film scene with a real bang after the release of their break out films. Both directors expertly blend several genres including surrealism, drama, comedy, horror, and social commentary. They include the previously mentioned Senegalese director Mati Diop’s zombie refugee social drama Atlantique and this visually captivating film by Zambian born director Rungano Nyoni, I am not a Witch. The film is about a young orphan girl named Shula who is accused of witchcraft, who, because of the confusion at being so hated by her community, possibly begins to believe she is a witch and never denies the accusation. The stone faced performance by Maggie Mulubwa makes it difficult for us to determine exactly what is going on in her troubled mind, and the film is so visually magical that it takes time for the audience to know if witches exist in the world of the film or not. When Shula is forced to choose one man from a group of more than a dozen she does so correctly, the witches live in a visually alluring community where they are tied to long spools of ribbon that unwhirl as they move around doing their work, and the film ends with a sort of a miracle in a stunning final tragedy where the camera captures the witches from above singing a eulogy while dressed in blood red fabric. The film may look magical, but the title itself makes it clear that these witches are nothing more than normal women oppressed by a society that takes their problems out on them for the simple fact that they are different or strange. While the film is a visually enchanting, damning critique against the societal oppression of women, it has moments of brilliant comedy as well. Our comedic fall guy is the enormous, puffed up, business suit wearing government official played by Henry B.J. Phiri. Phiri brings witch prosecution to the 21st Century. He is a bumbling bureaucrat who, instead of burning witches, takes advantage of them by forcing them to do hard labor and using their supposed powers to make money and solve minor, rural crimes in exchange for offering them a home in government sponsored camps. He is as corrupt as he is ignorant, and completely believes in the powers of the witch community, hilariously declaring a man guilty, without proof, simply because Shula randomly points at him, and proudly proclaiming to the witches that the government is providing them, ‘not only with a new truck, but with an now ORANGE truck.’ He is a brilliantly exaggerated representation of the brainless government officials present that we can all relate to no matter where we come from. This touching mixture of fantasy, drama, and comedy makes the career of Nyoni something to look out for. 

Kenya, Rafiki 2019, Wanuri Kahiu

Despite being the first Kenyan film to be featured at the Cannes Film Festival, Rafiki, the first Kenyan film to tell a story of lesbian lovers, was banned in it’s own country where having homosexual sex is punished by 14 years in prison. It is directed by yet another promising, young African female director, and while the film shows the prejudice and danger gay couples face in Kenya, it is first and foremost a sweet love story between two young girls. Their first moments together and the glances they exchange are tender and sensual, and it is not until the end of the film that the political impossibility of their relationship comes violently forward. Kahiu has a real eye for color, and her shots are even brighter and more vibrant than those from an Almodovar film. The girls, in a sort of Juliet and Juliet spin, are the two daughters of politicians running for office against each other. Kena is a tomboy who likes hanging out with the guys and playing football, who in a sort of Blue is the Warmest color way, is attracted by another girl with an unconventional hair style, the dancing girly girl Ziki, whose bright pink hair hangs like tubes of cotton candy colored spaghetti from her head. Both actresses are quite good despite a script that has some terrible creaky moments. The film works best without dialogue, because a lot of the lines are just unbelievably simple, but the film more or less overcomes this thanks to Kahiu’s expert work with the camera. It may not be the best LGBT film ever made, but it is a revolutionary step forward for African cinema, where being homosexual is not only not accepted, but considered as a crime. Hopefully it will open the floodgates for more of these extremely necessary stories to be told to the point that being homosexual is demythologized by showing that loving someone of the same sex is not somthing to be disgusted by, but something to be moved by.