African Cinema

Hundreds of young revolutionaries take to the streets of Kinshasa when Joseph Kabila, President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, refuses to relinquish power at the end of his second term. Protests are met with violence, but the battle for free elections and democracy cannot be repressed.
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Sidestepping conventional approaches to narrative, Kinshasa Makambo is a ground-level account of collective action told with blistering immediacy. With his attentive, perceptive camera, Dieudo Hamadi takes to the streets for an urgent portrait of young Congolese protestors fighting for democracy.Read More »

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This is certainly the first African film to tackle the problem of street children and drugs. Idrissa is a rebellious little boy who drops out of school and joins a gang of hooligans that live on the beaches of Dakar. He gradually becomes detached from his family and adopted by his new friends who initiate him into the art of theft and the pleasures of yamba, marijuana. In his new role as a “tough guy”, Idrissa becomes Boy Idi and begins to push joints. Everybody seems to smoke in Dakar. “Even respectable people do it”, says one of the small drug pushers. Whilst Idrissa’s father loses interest in the fate of his son, his mother decides to go to the police and an inspector sets off to hunt down the gang.Read More »

A forestry engineer pushes for reforestation measures, against the will of his selfish superiors, and embarks on a search for a mystical healing plant linking him with the ancestral knowledge of his people.Read More »

Synopsis:
In 1992, Nabil Ayouch directed Les Pierres bleues du désert, a first short film with Jamel Debbouze which tells the history of a convinced young man that there are large blue stones in the desert.Read More »

A fight between an Imam and his powerful brother over their children’s marriage. At stake: how a small community slowly drifts towards extremism.Read More »

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This rich documentary follows the legendary Senagalese filmmaker Sembene Ousmane from the Pan African Film Festival in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso back to the streets of Dakar and his Galle Ceddo home at Yoff, overlooking the sea. Revisiting several locations of his films, Sembene Ousmane reminisces about his career and discusses his craft.Read More »

It is the holy month of Ramadan in Morocco in 1981. Amina, accompanied with her seven years old son Mehdi, come to live with her father-in-law Ahmed in a small village in Morocco, after her husband was arrested for political reasons. The arrest of the father must stay a secret for Mehdi who was told that his father traveled to France for work.Read More »

This rich documentary follows the legendary Senagalese filmmaker Sembene Ousmane from the Pan African Film Festival in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso back to the streets of Dakar and his Galle Ceddo home at Yoff, overlooking the sea. Revisiting several locations of his films, Sembene Ousmane reminisces about his career and discusses his craft.Read More »

Sara dreams of opening a bar and fielding a team for the Women’s Football World Cup. Keeping close to its protagonists, this documentary gives an account of everyday existence in Khartoum and how tradition, politics and religion dictate women’s lives.Read More »