African cinema

In the 1950s, fear and violence escalate as the people of Algiers fight for independence from the French government.

A comic allegory about a traveling Bushman who encounters modern civilization and its stranger aspects, including a clumsy scientist and a band of revolutionaries.

A small village in Burkina Faso. The story focuses on Bila, a ten year old boy who befriends an old woman, Sana. Everybody calls her 'Witch' but Bila himself calls her 'Yaaba' (grandmother). When Bila's cousin Nopoko gets sick it is Sana's medicine who saves her.

In southern France, a Franco-Arabic shipyard worker along with his partner's daughter pursues his dream of opening a restaurant.

When a woman shelters a group of girls from suffering female genital mutilation, she starts a conflict that tears her village apart.

This compelling tale of love and betrayal, set in the upper Egyptian countryside, follows the story of Amna as she plots her revenge on the engineer who destroyed her family's honor.

Finye tackles the generation gap in post-colonial West Africa. Its heroine is the pot smoking daughter of a provincial military governor who falls in love with a fellow university student, the descendent of one of Mali's chiefs.

The story of two people who cross paths in Nouhadhibou.

A group of children living on the street leave their gang, prompting retribution from the gang's leader. After one of the children dies, the rest try to come up with the resources to give their friend a proper burial.

Inspired by true events, an oil-rich Nigerian community wages war against an oil corporation to protect their land from being destroyed. Rebels kidnap an American oil executive and demand that his corporation end the destruction.

Mid-air difficulties forces a Nigerian commercial plane into an emergency landing with devastating consequences.

In April 1994, the middle-aged Canadian journalist Bernard Valcourt is making a documentary in Kigali about AIDS. He secretly falls in love for the Tutsi waitress of his hotel Gentille, who is younger than him, in a period of violent racial conflicts. When the genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda begins, Bernard does not succeed in escaping with Gentille to Canada. When the genocide finishes in July 1994, Bernard returns to the chaotic Kigali seeking out Gentille in the middle of destruction and dead bodies.

Mory, a cowherd, and Anta, a university student, try to make money in order to go to Paris and leave their boring past behind.

Six days in the violent life of a young Johannesburg gang leader.

Mapantsula tells the story of Panic, a petty gangster who inevitably becomes caught up in the growing anti-apartheid struggle and has to choose between individual gain and a united stand against the system.

An American woman doctor comes to Tanzania to work at a hospital for the mentally disturbed, with her Tanzanian lover. There, she meets a sometimes catatonic patient, Samahe, who seems to be in communication with another reality. In their confrontation with their individual and collective pasts, Dr Asira and Samehe are bound by fears and half remembered images of unbearable pain. Only through the spirit of Maangamizi, can the women resume their lives with an understanding of the ancestors and their eternal presence in a world of cruelty, hatred and death. It is a story that seeks to reclaim the connection between Africa and her Diaspora, and one that dares to represent the histories of two continents as it peels away layers upon layers of pain to bring healing of the soul.

As she grows up, Alia (the daughter of housemaid Khedija) learns the secrets of the peaceful palace where she and her mother live.

The story of an 84 year-old Kenyan villager and ex Mau Mau veteran who fights for his right to go to school for the first time to get the education he could never afford.

Present-day Chad. Adam, fifty-five, a former swimming champion, is pool attendant at a smart N'Djamena hotel. When the hotel gets taken over by new Chinese owners, he is forced to give up his job to his son Abdel. Terribly resentful, he feels socially humiliated. The country is in the throes of a civil war. Rebel forces are attacking the government. The authorities demand that the population contribute to the "war effort", giving money or volunteers old enough to fight off the assailants. The District Chief constantly harasses Adam for his contribution. But Adam is penniless; he only has his son....

Running the streets of Rome in 1960, an unknown, barefooted Ethiopian man stunned the world by winning Olympic gold in the marathon. Overnight, Abebe Bikila became a sports legend. A hero in his own country and to the continent, Bikila was the first African to win a gold medal, and four years later in Tokyo would become the first person in history to win consecutive Olympic gold medals in the marathon. This soldier and quiet son of a shepherd would be acknowledged by many as the greatest long distance runner the world had ever known. One evening while returning to his home in Addis Ababa from training in the Ethiopian countryside, Bikila was involved in a tragic car accident which left him paralyzed from the waist down. Unable to walk and faced with the greatest challenge of his life, he struggled to maintain his will to live and in the process discovered a deeper meaning of competition, taking up archery for the Paralympics and competing as a handicapped dog sledder in Norway. Though his running career had come to a tragic end, the race of his life had a new beginning. For the first time, the true story of Bikila's epic quest for life and sport comes to the big screen. Not since Raging Bull has the life of an athlete been rendered with such emotional power and cinematic grace.

A young lawyer travels to an Ethiopian village to represent Hirut, a 14-year-old girl who shot her would-be husband as he and others were practicing one of the nation's oldest traditions: abduction into marriage.