Africa Is a Country

5 New Films to Watch Out For, N°27

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

5 New Films to Watch Out For, N°27

By
Tom Devriendt

An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is the creative debut feature of director Terence Nance who we got to know through the work he did together with Blitz the Ambassador. His new film is sold as a take on “young love” in the city of New York. First reviews praise, among other things, the mesh of visual styles: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZabqZmA9lE

Below’s the pilot video for King Khama: The African Abe Lincoln (assuming the second part of the tile is provisional), a proposed animated movie about Botswana’s King Khama III. Know your history. The project’s website has more details (including excerpts of the script).

The Forgotten Kingdom is a long feature written and directed by Andrew Mudge. The Examiner has an interview with him about the genesis of the film — we learn the production crew was small, “made up mostly of interns from within the country with no film experience”, starring a cast of Basotho and South African actors — and a first favorable review. Predictably, debates broke out on the film’s Facebook wall after the release of the trailer over whether this is “the first film to come out of Lesotho” (the line they’re promoting it with), “a Lesotho film,” or “a South African film”. We won’t wade in. No news yet on when it will be showing in Maseru’s cinemas:



Tik & the Turkey is a one-hour documentary, currently in post-production, depicting the heroin and methamphetamine (also known as “tik”) problem in Cape Town, South Africa and the devastating effects it has on the people and the communities. Some perspective of the story’s urgency: a recent report suggested “1 in 5” (stats depend on who you ask) of school-going youth in the Cape flats are actively using tik.



Ali Blue Eyes is a film by Claudio Giovannesi about an Italian teen of Egyptian heritage (lead role for Nader Sarhan) caught between his conflicting identities. Variety‘s review is onto something when the author remarks that while “(a) young man trying to balance his roots with his environment has long been a familiar figure in cinema, the subject is of more recent vintage in Italy, which has only recently begun coming to grips with an immigrant population.”

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.