Africa Is a Country

5 New Films to Watch, N°21

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

5 New Films to Watch, N°21

By
Tom Devriendt

5 new documentaries this week. Crop: Talking About Images is a film directed by Marouan Omara and Johanna Domke. The film, quoting its website, “reflects upon the impact of images in the Egyptian Revolution and puts it in relation to the image politics of Egypt’s leaders. Instead of showing footage from the revolution, the film is shot entirely in the power domain of images — Egypt’s oldest and most influential state newspaper Al Ahram.” From the top-level executive office down to the smallest worker, the documentary follows a photo journalist who missed the revolution due to a hospital stay. Here’s an excerpt: 

Même pas Mal (No Harm Done) is a film by Nadia El Fani and Alina Isabel Pérez that follows up on El Fani’s ‘Securalism – Inch’Allah’. The tone in ‘No Harm Done’, according to first viewers, has become darker, the director’s attitude noticeably more radical. “This may be due in part to her personal history: her cancer, the operation, chemotherapy on the one hand, paralleled by the unprecedented radical Islamist hate campaign against her film in Tunisia, which culminated in death threats against the director published on the social networks.” French-Tunisian Nadia El Fani received the best documentary film award at Fespaco this year. The film hasn’t been screened in Tunisia yet. Nor can the filmmaker return home.

The documentary Creation in Exile: Five Filmmakers in Conversation follows Newton Aduaka, John Akomfrah, Haile Gerima, Dani Kouyaté and Jean Odoutan: five African filmmakers in the diaspora (Paris, Washington, London, Uppsala), their everyday lives echoing sequences of their films. A film by Daniela Ricci:

Returning the Remains (“A Khoe Story 2”) is poet, writer and filmmaker Weaam Williams and Nafia Kocks’ 50 minute documentary about the history of the “unspoken of genocide” on South Africa’s Khoe/Khoi people. “The most challenging documentary film we’ve ever made,” Williams describes it in a recent interview. Here’s a first clip:

On a lighter note, Geoff Yaw’s King Me explores the world of competitive checkers play as seen through the eyes of South African Lubabalo Kondlo. In 2007, Kondlo, with the help of some sympathetic Americans, traveled to the U.S. to compete in the U.S. National Championship of Checkers in Las Vegas, Nevada. A relative unknown in the legitimate checkers world, Kondlo crushed the competition and earned the right to challenge 20+ year reigning World Champ, Ron ‘Suki’ King:

Further Reading

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.