Year after year, films shot across Africa by African or non-African filmmakers, prove to be favorites at film festivals, at award ceremonies and now also on streaming media. The year 2015 was a good period for African cinema as the number of films produced increased and new filmmakers were discovered.
After great acclaim worldwide, Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu was a big winner at the French César Awards. And in early 2016, Netflix, which started to operate this month in North Africa and the Gulf region, as well as a number of sub-Saharan countries, acquired five African-related films including Confusion Na Wa (Kenneth Gyang, 2013); Concerning Violence (Goran Olsson, 2014); B For Boy (Chika Anadu, 2013); The Forgotten Kingdom (Andrew Mudge, 2013); and Fifty (Biyi Bandele, 2015). Netflix plans to expand its services across Africa this year.
Early in 2015, Sundance showed a documentary on the father of African Cinema, Ousmane Sembène, by directors Samba Gadjigo and Jason Silverman who told the story of the self-taught novelist and filmmaker’s long battle to make African stories by Africans. Gadjigo, who was Sembène’s colleague and biographer, used rare archival footage and more than 100 hours of exclusive materials, that made the documentary a must-see.
From Ethiopia, Yared Zeleke’s Lamb became the first Ethiopian film to make it to Cannes as an official selection. The drama focuses on the story of Ephraïm who loses his mother to famine but still takes care of his pet lamb – although his uncle sees the animal as food for an upcoming feast.
Shot in Ghana, Beasts of No Nation by Cary Joji Fukunaga chronicles the life of a young boy named Agu (Abraham Attah) who lives with his parents, older brother and two younger siblings in a small village where civil war ignites. When military-aligned rebels take over, the commandant (played by Idris Elba) adopts Agu and makes him a soldier.
Necktie Youth by Sibs Shongwe-La Mer revolves around adolescents living in the affluent suburbs of Johannesburg, looking for answers around the death of their beautiful friend, yet being distracted by drugs and crime.
The documentary Independence by Mario Bastos was born out of the need to preserve the stories of those people who struggled for the liberation of Angola. Many are still alive and lucid but few have documented their journey or had the opportunity to talk about what they experienced outside of their circle of family and friends.
The documentary The Siren of Faso Fani by Michel K Zongo premiered in Berlinale 2015. The director retraces the story of the Faso Fani textile factory in Koudougou, Burkina Faso’s third-largest city. Zongo, who grew up in this city, reopens the case of this legendary factory that was shut down in the year 2001. He visits former employees and some of the city’s inhabitants, including his uncle, who once owned a much admired modern cult object thanks to Faso Fani: one of the first refrigerators in town. Zongo digs through radio and TV archives and pieces together the factory’s proud history, which produced so much more than just textiles.
Hundreds – if not thousands – of African migrants died this year while attempting to cross the Mediterranean to Europe. This perilous journey has been the focus of a number of recent documentaries and narrative films. Spanish director Gerardo Olivares’s 2007 drama 14 Kilometres tells the story of two Nigerien men and a Malian woman stranded in the desert as they attempt to reach Spain.
In the 2010 documentary Adrift: People of a Lesser God, undercover French reporter Dominique Christian Mollard sails with 38 African migrants on the dangerous journey from Mauritania to the Canary Islands. German director Miriam Fassbender’s 2011 documentary Foreign follows a young Malian man on one of the oldest migration routes from Algeria and Morocco to Spain. The focus of all of these films, however, is on the unsuccessful attempts of Africans to cross the borders to Europe.
Last year, a new film emerged at Cannes that considers a different scenario: what is the fate of those who do, in fact, reach Europe? The docudrama Mediterranea followed two men who had already made it through the dangerous journey from Africa to Italy. Once they arrive, however, they face hostility and violence in this shocking look at the life-and-death struggles of migrants in Europe.
The film’s director is Jonas Carpignano, the son of an African-American mother and an Italian father. When the first racial riots took place across Rosarno in southern Italy in 2010, Carpignano went to Calabria to get a better grasp of the situation. This inspired him to make a short (A Chjàna, 2012) based on the true story of Koudous Seihon, an immigrant who helped the filmmaker to recreate his migration from Burkina Faso to Italy. Months later, the short was expanded into a full-length feature.
In Mediterranea, Seihon recreates his story once again, this time playing the character of Ayiva, who travels with his younger brother Abas from Burkina Faso to Algeria and into Libya before crossing the Mediterranean. Upon arrival in Italy, the two brothers discover that their new living conditions in Europe are worse than what they left behind in Burkina Faso. At the start of the 20th century, New York and Chicago welcomed immigrants from Calabria, including Carpignano’s ancestors. Right now, Europe is unwilling to welcome migrants, though millions of refugees from Iraq, Syria and a number of African countries cannot live in their own homeland. Ultimately, we are left with many unanswered questions, perhaps not unlike the fate of our two protagonists.
By Sherif Awad
