In an episode in George Amponsah’s insightful and compassionate documentary The Fighting Spirit, a boxing trainer from the Ghanian fishing village of Bukom, having arrived with his protégée to England for an international competition, marvels at the technological achievement behind the gleaming urban landscape, commenting that the problem of African stagnation does not stem from […]
Jean-Pierre Bekolo channels the manic freeverse, urban culture, and confrontational humor of Spike Lee’s early films in Quartier Mozart, an eccentric, socially incisive fable on a schoolgirl known as Queen of the ‘Hood who, with the aid of the village witch, Maman Thekla, asks to experience life as a man in Yaounde’s working class district […]
A frequently recurring theme in the NYAFF Shorts Program, Emerging Voices from the Maghreb – and perhaps, in the entire festival – is the history of culturally enabled marginalization of women in contemporary society, and this theme clearly resonates in Ali Benkirane’s Amal, an understated portrait of a cheerful and precocious girl living in a […]
A newly paroled Zulu man named Zama walks out of prison and into a waiting car driven by his best friend and former accomplice, Respect, who immediately recruits him as a hired muscle for a planned heist. Eager to rebuild his life and make a clean break from his criminal past, Zama walks away from […]
An aging museum curator named Alloune (Sotigui Kouyaté) conducts walking tours of a historical internment and transfer port in Goree Island used during the slave trade, a vocation that often makes him a first-hand witness to the tourists’ emotionally wrenching experience. Haunted by recurring dreams of his ancestors, he becomes convinced that at the root […]
Rachid Bouchareb’s indelible and haunting short film The Colonial Friend is a muted, yet thoughtful and compelling true historical account of the 1944 massacre by the French army of indigenous African soldiers who sought to collect wages for their military service. Centered on a Cameroonian farmer, Abi, who, like many able-bodied indigenous men from colonized […]