Distinctly African films to watch

With the passing of Africa Day and Africa month it is opportune to revisit the vast, rich and often overlooked history of African cinema. Here are three films that offer poignant and instantly accessible stories from across the continent, whose distinctive styles and concerns make them works of art.

ART HOUSE ESSENTIAL:

Timbuktu — Mubi.com

Born in Mauritania and raised in Mali, director Abderrahmane Sissako has enjoyed international acclaim since his 2002 drama Waiting for Happiness was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes.

This 2014 drama earned him a Palme d’Or and Best Foreign Film Oscar nominations, and it remains an impressively delicate work that balances compassion and anger, and outstanding poetic visual treatment of difficult material.

Set against the backdrop of the brief but brutal occupation of the titular ancient city by Islamic fundamentalists in 2012, the film weaves a series of interconnected stories and characters to create a panoramic view of the effects of the occupation on people from all walks of life.

It’s message is urgent and righteously relevant; Sissako has a particular talent for highlighting important and often horrifying social realities while also observing the darkly comic absurdities of everyday life, and there are such many moments here. Timbuktu stands as a masterclass in combining the urgency of social commentary with the necessities of compelling storytelling.

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STONE COLD CLASSIC:

Yeelen — YouTube

Souleyman Cissé is a pioneer of African filmmaking whose work has seen him hailed as one of the globe’s most original cinematic voices. Now in his 80s, the Malian director was awarded Cannes’ prestigious Golden Coach award this year in recognition of his decades-long struggle to tell uniquely African stories in distinctive and original ways. Since the beginning of his career in the 1970s, Cissé has made just nine feature films, often in the most difficult of financial and production circumstances. His awesome reputation rests predominantly on the strength of the four films which he released between 1975 and this 1987 masterwork that earned him the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1987.

The film, whose title translates as “the light,” or “brightness”, is based on a 13th century legend and tells the story of a young man born in an indeterminate pre-colonial era among the Bambara people of Mali. His father is a powerful local shaman who, fearing his progeny’s potential supernatural powers, attempts to kill the boy and his mother. They manage to flee, and while keeping one precious step ahead of the murderous father, the boy grows into a young man who does indeed have the powers his father feared, and has learnt to harness them. His maturity on both physical and spiritual levels prepares him for an inevitable denouement.

Simply told and beautifully realised with a luminosity worthy of its title, Yeelen remains “a masterwork of metaphysical realism”, as one as one critic put it, that plays important political recognition of pre-colonial African belief systems and their power, while also casting a critical eye on outdated ideas about patriarchy and the sacrifices required for resistance to old ways.

It’s also a wholly African creation story that elegantly and seamlessly weaves together the supernatural and natural realms, emphasising their equal importance in the lives and experience of its characters. 

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DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH

I Am Not a Witch — Showmax

Written and directed by Rungano Nyoni who was born in Zambia but raised in the UK, this debut feature from 2017 is a remarkably assured and mature examination of oppression, exploitation and dangerously outdated practices in her homeland. 

When a young girl living in a remote village in Zambia is denounced as a witch, she finds herself on a Kafkaesque journey; sent to a witches’ camp she becomes a witch for hire and the focus of a tourist exhibit with increasingly terrible and tragic consequences.

Nyoni displays an adept talent for spotlighting the absurdism and black humour in the midst of her heroine’s surreal odyssey. Her satire is directed at the broader social ills of misogyny, corruption, gender inequality, the dangers of monolithic national identity, and the abuse of power behind the façade of a modernised country — and she hits her targets squarely in the guts.

The film casts a compelling and layered spell, and offers a variety of tones along the course of its memorable narrative. You will be entertained, moved and heartbroken by the end.

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