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.

In the Last Days of the City – An Ode to a Disappearing Home

In The Last Days of the City Film Difficulty Ranking: 4

You might have seen Fellini’s La Dolce Vita or Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, two films that honor the city of Rome, but you probably haven’t seen In The Last Days of the City, Tamar El Said’s tribute to Cairo. Instead of a bombastic tour around the city, In the Last Days of the City’s tribute is muted. Instead of a warm film about one man’s love for his home city, In the Last Days of the City charts the director’s growing disillusionment with his home city and the increasingly militant and fundamentalist place it’s becoming.

From: Egypt, Africa
Watch: Trailer, JustWatch
Next: The Square, La Dolce Vita, The Journey

The Breakdown

El Said wanders around Cairo trying to find a new apartment. He needs a new place to live as his current landlord is evicting him to demolish his apartment block for a new more profitable construction. In his search, he visits many parts of the city, becoming an observer of everything happening. Whilst he wanders the city, he doesn’t interfere with anything going on. He watches the changing city passively and allows us (the audience) to form our own opinions on what we see. He’s like our Virgil from Dante’s Inferno, his role is to guide us around the city and show us what is changing.

Through his eye, we start to see the growing militarization and fundamentalism of the city and the gradual loss of freedom. In terms of the militarization, we see more and more army trucks and soldiers patrolling the city, plain closed policemen chasing people, and policemen beating and arresting protestors. In terms of the growing fundamentalism, we see ‘Thou Shall Not Look at Women’ slogans stuck on walls in apartment blocks and hear prayers playing over loudspeakers in apartment elevators. Backed by a soundtrack with snippets from radio shows speaking to the growing divisions in the country, the future of the city looks bleak.

There’s a scene which serves as a warning of Cairo’s negative future. In the scene, we meet a group of the directors friends in a cafe lit by light and laughter. It’s a rare scene of laughter and happiness. Each one of the group is living in a different corner of the Arabic diaspora and represent the choices that El Said has. Two of the friends are from Baghdad. They represent the extreme direction that Cairo could take. One has left the city for Europe after seeing his home city crumble to ruins. The other can’t leave his roots despite the violence, and continues to live in fear. Both of them fail to recognize the homely city that they grew up in. The third friend from Beirut, represents the middle ground between Cairo and Baghdad. His growing disillusionment and antipathy at the changes in Beirut are conquering his happy memories. But he’s still managing to grasp onto the last remnants of the city he loved before it becomes unrecognizable like Baghdad. Each of their stories are warning signs for the direction of El Said’s Cairo. He can stay and watch the city fade or he can leave the country with some of his positive memories intact.

El Said’s indecision is reflected in his struggles to make the film. He wants to capture the city he loved, the warm city of his memory, but as he’s filming, all he can see is the cities inevitable demise. He slowly comes to realize that he will either watch the city he loved slowly disappear or leave the city and preserve the happy memories that still survive in him.

What to Watch Next

If you want to watch more films which honor the director’s home city, check out Fellini and Sorrentino’s respective odes to Rome: La Dolce Vita and The Great Beauty. You could also check out Thom Andersen’s documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, composed completely out of Hollywood films.

Or if you’re more interested in seeing towns and cities slowly disappear, check out Once Upon a Time in Venezuela and Kings of Nowhere; two documentaries of towns destroyed by nature. There’s also Cuban docu-drama, The Project of the Century featuring one town full of hope destroyed by international politics.

Lastly, for more films set in Arabic cities subject to increasing fundamentalism and war, watch The Square from Egypt, Freedom Fields from Libya and The Journey from Iraq.

The Burial of Kojo – A Magical Quest Through Space and Time

The Burial of Kojo Film Difficulty Ranking: 4

Why Watch The Burial of Kojo

If you like films which take you on a magical journey
To see a film with a unique style
For a few hidden political layers

From: Ghana, Africa
Watch: Trailer, Netflix, JustWatch
Next: Sleepwalking Land, The Fall, Eve's Bayou

Tenere – Pan African Film Festival 2020

Tenere documents the incredible real life Mad Max journey of Nigerien people crossing the Sahara on customized trucks in search of an escape from their poverty. It’s an almost unbelievable journey, and although more people try to cross the desert than the Atlantic to get to Europe, it surprisingly rarely makes the news.

Tenere itself is an observational documentary that follows Bachir on his journey from Agadez to Dirkou in search of work. Bachir is one of the most experienced members of the group, having already made the journey across the Sahara a few times in order to provide for his family. This time, instead of going to Libya, which is no longer a land of opportunity because of the raging civil war, Bachir plans to stop and find work in Dirkou, 584km away from Agadez in the northeastern corner of Niger. However, what might be a days journey by car on normal roads is a perilous 5 day trek across the sands of the Sahara in blistering 45 degree heat (that’s over 110 degrees Fahrenheit). In this part of the world, roads don’t exist, just a lot of sand.

Tenere takes off cinematically when the journey leaves Agadez. There’s a point, roughly 10-15 minutes into their journey that the craziness of it hit me. Agadez is the 5th largest city in Niger, albeit a small one when compared to cities around the world with just over 100,000 inhabitants. It doesn’t look like a city teeming with opportunity when we see it on camera. The dust roads, mud houses, and lack of greenery indicate that human life here isn’t sustainable. However, compared to the desert the migrants travel through, Agadez is an oasis of life. After 10-15 minutes of traveling through the desert, the director starts using drone shots to shoot the truck loaded with goats, people, wares, and water, allowing us to see just how perilous the journey is. We can see that their truck is the only sign of life for miles, an island in a landscape that is purely sand and hot air. They’re truck is the desert equivalent of the Senegalese pirogues aimed towards Europe, completely isolated and just a few punctures away from certain death.

You might be wondering: “well, these people were never going to die because the filmmaker and his crew were there just in case something went wrong”. However, you might not know that this film was all shot by one Turkish man, Hasan Söylemez, with just a few cameras and a convoy of hired soldiers to protect them from desert bandits. There’s not much a camera and soldiers can do to help if your car breaks down when you’re two days drive from civilization and surrounded by sand and a 45 degree heat. It’s exactly at the halfway point of their journey that one man emerges inexplicably from the desert. He has just walked 17km to find help because his truck has broken down whilst carrying 20-25 migrants on its back. They’re all stuck by the car with their water supplies running out. If he didn’t find anyone willing to help, this truck load of people would succumb to the desert, like the many other people buried under car tire tombstones. It’s an unforgiving journey, and death always feels precariously close because of a lack of visible support. There are no signs of backup help, because there isn’t any.

Tenere is almost unbelievable. These guys and their custom stacked truck would fit perfectly into an apocalyptic Mad Max film. But the handheld camera and drone shots make it almost feel like we’re there with them, minus the heat and glaring sun. It’s a brilliant observational documentary that exposes another migration route that rarely makes the news. I watched this film whilst I was halfway through reading ‘The Devil’s Highway’, an account of the Yuma 14 who died crossing the Arizona desert, which made this film even more pertinent. If you’re sitting comfortably in your home in Europe or the U.S. thinking that you deserved the luck to be born there, watch this film and see exactly how people are risking their lives to try and reverse their own fortunes.

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

Absent Present – One Man Disappears in a Documentary About Migration

Absent Present Film Difficulty Ranking: 3

Why Watch Absent Present?

If you’re a fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History
To uncover the mystery behind a missing person, like Luis Ospina’s A Paper Tiger
To examine the legacy of colonization and slavery on African migration

From: Germany, Namibia, Europe, Africa
Watch: Trailer, IMDb
Next: A Paper Tiger, A Storm Was Coming, Little Dieter Needs to Fly

It’s All About How the Story is Told

Angelika Levi’s Absent Present is one well made documentary. If you’ve ever listened to an episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s equally well constructed Revisionist History you’ll find similarities with Angelika Levi’s documentary method. Like Revisionist History, Levi starts with an event – in this case the disappearance of her friend Benji – and unravels the threads linked to it to uncover a whole chain of associations from colonialism to migration. Having explored more of the threads linked to Benji’s life, we see his disappearance in a new light.

Uncovering the Mystery by Looking at the Big Picture

Benji’s disappearance is a mystery that Levi tries to unravel by following his path. Born in Namibia, he was one of many young Namibian children that were brought to the GDR (German Democratic Republic otherwise known as East Germany) having survived the Cassinga Massacre (a South African bombing raid on Namibian independence fighters). He spent 11 years in East Germany from ages 3-14 at an orphanage and German school, and became a naturalized East German citizen. However, in 1989 the GDR collapsed, East and West Germany reunified, and Namibia gained its independence. As a result, Benji was sent back to Namibia despite having grown up in Germany. Back in his birth country, Benji was kidnapped by Angolan soldiers and forced to join their liberation struggle. He managed to escape and returned to Europe disguised as a tourist. He eventually made it back to Germany, but disappeared a few years later. Levi travels from Germany to Namibia and back to Germany in Benji’s footsteps to try and investigate his disappearance. But ultimately, as she retraces his steps she finds the foot prints of more African refugees in Senegal and Spain and starts to uncover the hypocrisy of anti-immigration policies. By following the footsteps of migrants like Benji, Levi gives us a look at the big picture, which gives us a context to help explain Benji’s disappearance.

The Hypocrisy of Anti-Immigration Policy

Levi starts her broader investigation with the Columbus monument in Barcelona, a grand 19th century column that celebrates the discovery of the New World. At the top, Columbus points towards his ‘discovery’, a world where Columbus received gifts of welcome and from which Spain gained incredible wealth and prosperity. The hypocrisy of the monument is that it celebrates a migrant that crossed oceans in search of wealth, whilst today the same country that benefited from the wealth of other continents turns away migrants with similar intentions.

Levi also highlights the underlying racism behind Spain’s treatment of African migrants in the Canary Islands, juxtaposing images of white tourists relaxing on beaches and running through woods with images of Africans detained in camps just meters from tourist hot spots. The fact that these camps, that almost specifically hold African migrants, are built on the foundations of former slave camps makes it all the worse. Seen in this context, it’s not surprising that Benji tries to return to Europe disguised as a tourist with bleached hair. For Benji, and the African migrants that are detained in Spain, Europe is the only option left in their attempt to survive. It’s “Barcelona or Barsaak” (the Wolof for land of the dead). Viewed in its historical context, the anti-immigration policies of Europe look like an evolution of the legacies of slavery and colonialism. The Africans were forcibly brought to Europe and the Americas as slaves, forcibly exploited in colonialism, and now they are forcibly shut out of the riches their work and land created, detained as migrants.

Whilst the big picture Levi uncovers in Absent Present doesn’t answer why Benji disappeared, it does connect Benji’s forcible removal from his home country, and forcible repatriation to a brutal history of exploitation. It uncovers a hypocritical and racist history that takes African bodies when they’re needed and discards them when they’re not. Seen in this context Benji’s disappearance is not a mystery, but a symptom of the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and illegal immigration.

What to Watch Next

If you’re looking for another documentary that attempts to find a missing person, check out Luis Ospina’s A Paper Tiger. It tries to track down a Colombian artist named Manrique Figueroa by interviewing all the friends he left behind.

Or if you’re looking for more films in which migration and colonialism are a major topic I’d recommend exploring the following:

Atlantics – a feature film from Senegal that conveys the impact of a lost generation venturing north on their friends and family back at home.
Tenere – a documentary that tracks migrants crossing the Sahara desert on the back of Mad Max style converted trucks in Niger in quests to reach Europe.
A Storm Was Coming – a documentary that artistically represents how the Spanish Empire erased the indigenous cultures of Equatorial Guinea.

Or if you’re just looking for more documentaries narrated in English by great German film makers, check out Werner Herzog. His film, Little Dieter Needs to Fly is a great place to start. It’s a film about the life of a German war survivor that becomes a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Tsotsi

Tsotsi Film Difficulty Ranking: 2

Are you here for an introduction to the slums of South Africa? Well Tsotsi is a great place to start as the film is easy-to-watch, entertaining, and emotional (all the criteria for a fantastic Hollywood film). It is also a great pairing for City of God – a Brazilian great with more good music and great editing!

Why Watch Tsotsi?

To hear some great South African tunes
As it’s THE Foreign Language Academy Award winner from 2005
To see a little bit of Johannesberg
To get under the skin of a baby-faced thug (Tsotsi is slang for thug)

The Breakdown

Two guys are playing craps in a cluttered slum house. One of them rolls a four and a five and the players start arguing over whether it is a 9 or an 11. Another observer settles their argument whilst Tsotsi stares out a window at the end of the room. At this point, the banging South African music starts and Tsotsi and his crew leave the house and parade around the slums. These guys are the slum thugs of Johannesberg and we are going to hitch a ride with them into the city.

Right from the start we see the difference between the slums and the city. The slums are crowded, with shacks stacked on top of other shacks and no electricity or running water, except for a little tap that the community queues for. In contrast, the city is mostly clean and built up, especially in the wealthy suburbs which Tsotsi and his crew go and visit. The suburbs even have trees, cars, and gated houses. It is a completely different world.

Also pay attention to the editing, particularly when Tsotsi and his gang arrive in Johannesberg station looking for a target. The camera fixes Tsotsi’s face in the middle of the screen and cuts to see what he is looking at. The camera switches from Tsotsi to commuter, from Tsotsi to family, from Tsotsi to a man handing over money. Boom, here is his target. Now the camera cuts between Tsotsi’s face and the same man who he saw handing over money. The camera gets closer to Tsotsi and his chosen victim between the cuts as Tsotsi closes in on his target. The editing makes it clear that he isn’t there to just people watch.

The Conclusion

The slums are a part of Johannesberg, and to ignore them is to ignore Johannesberg. Similarly, to ignore the people that live in the slums is to ignore your fellow citizens. For this reason, Tsotsi is an important story. At the beginning we see and judge a ruthless criminal that needs to be punished. However, by the end we may change our mind with a little more understanding.