Africa

Best African Films

Africa is the heart of the world. Heaped with incredible cultural diversity the continent is a force in the film world that is destined to breach across to cinemas worldwide in the future. You may already have seen some of the best African films featured below already. For example, 2009’s District 9 – an ingenious documentary style science fiction set in South Africa made it big overseas. Africa also has it’s own Hollywood in Nigeria’s Nollywood, which churns out almost as many films as Bollywood every year.

Find the best African films below. My advice would be to start with Black Girl and work your way up to Timbuktu.

Or if you’re looking for the best films from a particular country, head straight to their country pages using the links below:

Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Gabon, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe

*We’re still looking for the best African films from countries without pages. Send us your recommendations.

Subira – Pan African Film Festival (PAFF) 2020

Subira is a well meaning film about a black Muslim girl from a small coastal town that is sold off into marriage to an Indian man in the city. However unfortunately it’s let down by a desire to create a happy ending at all costs.

Subira is her fathers favorite child. He takes her out to sea with him and lets her play with her friends in the street. In contrast, her mother wants her to stay in the house and stay away from boys to prepare her for a good marriage. So it’s no surprise that when her father dies in a freak accident, she’s married off quickly to a rich Indian man from Nairobi.

Life in Nairobi is completely different to her life living along the coast. Nairobi is a suffocating urban environment, which the director emphasizes through the high rise buildings, cafes full of people, and private rooms. In her husband’s home she’s also expected to cook, sew, and take care of the house overseen by her husband’s uncle. Her new strict uncle-in-law and the unfamiliar environment work together to build her longing for her dead father and her past freedoms at home. Forbidden to leave the house without permission, she starts to covertly attend swimming classes in the city to get closer to her sea-faring father.

When she’s found taking swimming lessons behind her husband’s back, Subira escapes the wrath of her uncle and husband by running back to her home by the sea. Her escape is her liberation. At home she can be who she wants without having to fulfill her husband or uncle’s expectations. Ending the film with her escape would have been a victory for an independent woman fighting against a fiercely patriarchal society.

Instead, the film keeps going, intent on securing a ‘happy ending’ between Subira and her husband. The problem is, the director doesn’t give the audience any reason to expect the husband will change. When Subira leaves, he screens all of her calls, and doesn’t try to do anything to win her back. He expects her to return, after all he is the man who picked her out of poverty to share his wealth. Ultimately, Subira is the one leading the attempts to get back together, which I felt undermined her choice to run away and liberate herself. It’s a well-meaning happy ending, but it would have been more powerful if she had chosen her own independence.

Gonarezhou: The Movie – Pan African Film Festival 2020

Gonarezhou: The Movie is a rags to riches crime story of one man rising from poverty into one of the most wanted poachers in Zimbabwe. It’s a valiant effort on a small budget (approximately $12,000) but is let down by clichés and unconvincing characters.

The film starts with an impressive panoramic shot of a group of soldiers aiming their assault rifles at a man running across the dried banks of a river with a wall of red cliffs on the other side of the river. In the next scene, the same man is strapped up to an IV in a hospital bed. His nurse turns off the radio when the host starts talking about illegal poaching – obviously a sore subject – but the man asks her to put it back on. As soon as the radio host asks for people to share their opinions about the poaching business, our bed-bound man calls in and offers to tell his story. But the radio host is having none of it, telling him to talk to his producers or write a letter… that is until the man reveals that he is Zulu.

From this point the film flashes back to tell Zulu’s story from living in poverty to becoming one of the country’s leading poachers. It’s a story with a lot of unfortunate clichés: Zulu’s mum dies leaving him alone, he’s a struggling artist that gives up on his dreams, a chance meeting sets him up with a crime lord who offers to save him from the gutter, and he falls in love with a prostitute. Ultimately, Zulu joins the group of poachers because he wants to get to know the attractive prostitute he meets and slowly works himself up to being one of the country’s most wanted men.

However, Zulu’s rise to becoming one of the country’s most wanted men never feels convincing. Zulu is obviously not a criminal by nature as he appears meek and timid, mostly preferring to look at the ground rather than the eyes of whoever is talking to him. It feels more like Zulu walks into poaching because he doesn’t know what else to do. He doesn’t appear to be in it for the money as he never flaunts or talks about his new found wealth. It’s also hard to believe he poaches for the prostitute as he never looks excited, anxious, or sad when he is with or without her. Because he still looks poor, doesn’t hold any power, and doesn’t have any motivation it’s hard to understand why he poaches and why he’s seen as so dangerous.

The film could have done with a bit more build up. There aren’t any signs of a police investigation for Zulu or his colleagues and therefore it doesn’t feel like there’s any threat of Zulu being caught. In the end, the police stumble onto his tracks by chance and a cheap twist is used to try and create a tension which hasn’t been built up beforehand. If there had been signs of an investigation and signs that Zulu was a wanted man, it might have raised the stakes for the finale.

Gonarezhou: The Movie deserves credit for making a movie about illegal poaching and human trafficking: two topics that rarely make the big screen. However, unfortunately the film feels a bit flat because the stakes never feel high enough to keep you on the edge of your seats for the film. Partly because we already know half the ending from the opening (he lives), but more so because Zulu is never seen as a wanted man until the finale, leaving no time to build up tension.

Head to our Pan African Film Festival Hub for more reviews from PAFF 2020.

Kijiji Changu (My Village) – Pan African Film Festival 2020

Kijiji Changu focuses on the relationship between two very different best friends Makame and Saidi. Saidi is a young playboy. He doesn’t have a steady job but is quick to give away what he has to get any of the local women in his bed. In contrast, Makame has already grown up. He fishes to earn money for his family and is already married and trying to conceive a child. The only strife in his life is that his mum and wife Maryam don’t get along, because his wife hasn’t given her a grandchild. However, when Maryam sleeps with Makame’s best friend Saidi in a desperate attempt to conceive, she becomes pregnant. But, whilst it saves her marriage and pleases her mother in law, it proves to have disastrous consequences.

From the sound of it, Kijiji Changu should have a lot of drama. There’s adultery, promiscuity, and rivalries between a wife and her mother in law and two best friends. However, Kijiji Changu fails to translate any of this drama to the screen due to a lack of narrative focus and a repetitive soundtrack.

Firstly, the story is unfocused. The film begins by setting up the brotherly relationship between Makame and Saidi. In some scenes they’re best friends and others worst enemies, but it kind of makes sense, as after all, they are very different characters. The plot slowly moves on with Makame and Saidi being friends, then not talking, friends, then not talking, even after Saidi sleeps with Maryam. The adulterous act is a prime opportunity to spark some fire into their love triangle relationship, but instead of developing the drama, the film loses focus. Instead of wondering how his wife had got pregnant when he hasn’t been with her in the whole film, Makame blindly celebrates the news that Maryam is pregnant. The film then fades out and returns to the village 9 months later in which the focus of the film switches to a story about HIV. In doing so, the character rivalries the initial hour built up are pushed to the side.

Secondly, the repetitive soundtrack messes with the emotional tone of the film by playing the same song to very different visual scenes. For example, the same song is played when Saidi seduces a woman as when the mother in law scratches her tongue at Maryam, and when one man enters the hospital. Each of these three scenes should elicit a different emotional response from the audience, but because the same musical piece backs each of them, the tone is muted. Soundtracks usually guide our emotional response by matching the same music to scenes which share similar emotions visually. However, in this case, the soundtrack doesn’t always match the visual emotions which confuses how we are meant to perceive the film.

Head to our Pan African Film Festival Hub for more reviews from PAFF 2020.

Ekoua – Pan African Film Festival (PAFF) 2020

Ekoua is an ambitious animated dystopian film from Cote d’Ivoire featuring a Hero’s Journey story which unfortunately loses itself in exposition.

Visually, the 3D animation looks like it’s still in the development stage. Many animated objects are incomplete or forgotten about, such as a waiter carrying a tray with her arms by her side. More objects unnaturally cross spatial boundaries, such as a the baby’s legs blending into the crib it’s lying in when they move.

There’s also an unnecessary amount of shots in which characters are traveling from A to B either by walking or in cars. These shots are usually lengthened either side of the shot to show characters frozen still before and after they’ve started traveling. It adds time to a film which doesn’t need it. It reminded me of watching someone play a long game of Sims.

You could fault the criticisms above on a lack of funding or animated capabilities. Animated African films are rare compared to the number of animated films produced in North America and Asia. Ekoua is an ambitious attempt at creating a new dystopian world through animation. However, even with the limited animation capabilities, a complex storyline makes Ekoua hard to love.

At the start of the film, Ekoua sets itself up as a potential satire by introducing a dystopian world ruled by scammers. However, the scammer dystopia set up in the opening is never explained. The only scammers we see are two brightly dressed men that make it rain in clubs, and suspiciously keep following Ekoua for no apparent reason. Instead of exploring the scammer dystopia, Ekoua alters direction to follow a narrative of Ekoua becoming a ‘seer’ and eliminating an evil baby.

From there the film felt like a slow crazy dream. Here’s an outline of a portion of the plot I understood:

Ekoua becomes a seer thanks to an elder.
She has a vision that informs her that her neighbors newborn baby is an evil spirit reincarnated and that she must eliminate it to avoid repeating the same mistakes her mum made.
Scammers chase Ekoua and beat her up.
Ekoua takes the evil baby.
Royal police show up and guide Ekoua to the capital with the evil baby.
A band of mutated hyenas led by a mutant elephant named Koffi stop them and steal the baby.
Ekoua tracks the band of mutants to their hideout and recovers the baby.
Ekoua and the royal policeman move on to the capital.

Then the plot gets confusing.

Overall, Ekoua could do with a bit more simplicity. The story has a lot of different strands (scammer world, Ekoua’s mum, visions, hero’s journey) that make it hard to follow. With a more focused script and more budget to improve the animation, Ekoua would instantly improve.

Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) – AFI Fest 2020

Eyimofe is split into two stories. One features Mofe, a middle aged man who works as an electrician and lives with his sister and her children. The other features Rosa, a young woman who works as a hairdresser that takes care of her younger, pregnant sister. They share two obvious things in common. Firstly, they’re both trying to escape Lagos by obtaining visas to emigrate to Europe. Secondly, they’re both struggling to get by. Together, they represent a desire to escape poverty.

However, their visas definitely don’t seem legitimate. Mofe tries to obtain his from a guy with a computer that works at a stall in the middle of the street. Rosa’s method is worse, as she’s found a local mafiosa woman that has offered to get her and her sister visas in exchange for their baby. Their methods are symbolic of the global apartheid that restrict the underprivileged from freedom of movement. As we saw in AFI Fest’s I Carry You With Me and Farewell Amor, the legal routes for obtaining a visa to ‘the West’ are extremely limited for those without money.

Their lives aren’t just affected by their inability to get visas. They’re also stuck in the bureaucracy of inadequate social welfare at home. After Mofe’s sister dies, he gets caught in a long process of different forms and fees he has to fill out and pay before her death can be resolved. We see the whole process, from paying the morgue where the body is interred through to settling the inheritance. Likewise, Rosa has to fork out endless fees and debts to help out her pregnant sister. In contrast, life for the middle and upper class is a breeze. Mofe’s wealthy father can hire an expensive lawyer to swoop in and claim his daughter’s inheritance even if he hasn’t seen her for 10 years. And Rosa’s new American boyfriend can suddenly ghost her when she needs him for financial support. The wealthy can take advantage of the underprivileged (Mofe and Rosa) when they’re up, and avoid them as soon as they’re asked to help.

Eyimofe is a two part film which captures the wealth and class divide in Lagos. When you’re doing OK, you’re allowed independence and respect, but as soon as you meet hardship, everyone avoids you or takes advantage.

Head to our AFI Fest Hub for more reviews and short films from AFI Fest 2020.