Africa Is a Country

New Documentaries To Look Out For at the Luxor African Film Festival

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

New Documentaries To Look Out For at the Luxor African Film Festival

By
Tom Devriendt

The third edition of the Egyptian Luxor African Film Festival again has a wide-ranging programme scheduled for next month. Selected films will be showing in different competitions: Long Narrative, Short Narratives, Short Documentaries and Long Documentary. Below you’ll find a couple of the selected documentaries’ trailers (set in Togo, Senegal, Ghana, Somalia, South Africa, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt and Angola) that were recently uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo, plus links to the films’ websites — where available.

Nana Benz (2012, 85 min, director Thomas Bölken) | Togo

Touba (2013, Chai Vasarhelyi) | Senegal

Lettres du Voyant (2013, Louis Henderson) is a documentary-fiction about spiritism and technology in contemporary Ghana, which attempts to uncover a mysterious practice called “Sakawa” – internet scams mixed with voodoo magic.

From the same filmmaker, Louis Henderson, also showing is Logical Revolts (2012) | Egypt

Angola Ano Zero (2013, Ever Miranda) | Angola

The River (2013, 86 min, Abdenour Zahzah). During a journey on foot along the Oued El Kebir River, Zahzah encounters mini-societies of people who give us a different picture of Algeria.

Ali’ens: Somalis in Transit (2013, 90 min, Paula Palacios) | Somalia

Emirs in Wonderland (2013, 75 min, Ahmed Jlassi) | Tunisia

Made in Gougou (2013, Latifa Doghri) | Tunisia

Light and Dark (2013, 45 min, Paulene Abrey), a biopic of South African artist Norman Catherine | South Africa

LAFF takes place from 16 March to 24 March. See the Festival’s website for more details.

Further Reading

After the uprising

Following two years of mass protest, Kenya stands at a crossroads. A new generation of organizers is confronting an old question: how do you turn revolt into lasting change? Sungu Oyoo joins the AIAC podcast to discuss the vision of Kenya’s radical left.

Redrawing liberation

From Gaza to Africa, colonial cartography has turned land into property and people into populations to be managed. True liberation means dismantling this order, not redrawing its lines.

Who deserves the city?

Colonial urbanism cast African neighborhoods as chaotic, unplanned, and undesirable. In postcolonial Dar es Salaam, that legacy still shapes who builds, who belongs, and what the middle class fears the city becoming.

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

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.