Africa Is a Country

5 New Films to Watch, N°24

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

5 New Films to Watch, N°24

By
Tom Devriendt

The Revolution Won’t Be Televised is Rama Thiaw’s (born in Mauritania, grew up between Senegal and France) second long-feature film. She documents one year in the life of Thiat and Kilifeu, members of the Senegalese Keur Gui band who went on to organize the ‘Y’en a Marre’ movement. This will probably not be the last documentary on the collective:

http://vimeo.com/58118187

(Related: ‘Y’en a Marre’ doesn’t have an English Wikipedia entry, so Ethan Zuckerman created one.)

Further South, Cape Town Hip-Hop (is it a movement?) gets portrayed in Die Hip in Kaapse Hop (“The Hip in Cape Hop”), featuring familiar and less familiar artists such as Dplanet, Rattex –that’s his tune “Welcome to Khayelitsha” in the trailer below–, Emile YX, Codax, Brazuka, graffiti artist Falko, Shameela ShamRock, Driemanskap, Ready D, Rezzano, Azuhl, and Bliksemstraal. Produced by MCL Pictures and LS Design Lab:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt-eYeoVvrA

On December 17, 1962, Mamadou Dia, President of the Senegalese Council of Ministers, was arrested and given a life sentence, accused of organizing a coup d’état by his friend and companion Leopold Sedar Senghor. He would be imprisoned with four of his closest ministers. Among them, Joseph Mbaye, Minister of Rural Economy, uncle of Ousmane William Mbaye, who made a documentary about what happened in the run-up to that day:

Les Rêves Meurtris (“Shattered dreams”) is a short film by Hady Diawara, dedicated to Yaguine Koïta and Fodé Tounkara, the two young men from Guinée-Conakry who froze to death as stowaways on a flight to Belgium back in 1999:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFlOS7aL4u0

Une Si Belle Inquiétude (“Such a beautiful restlessness”) is a 12-minutes short by Brahim Fritah, in which he looks back on his travelings between France and Morocco through the use of some of the (archival) photos made along the way:

Bonus: you can watch the film in full over at French news website Mediapart.

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.