Delwende

An african student in Paris needs to work by night to finance the rest of his studies. By coincidence he gets a lot of money and turns back home to Burkina Faso with his french friend - but life is not that easy anywhere. Still watching how it is to be a stranger here or there can be quite funny.

A great day for Joe: he has graduated from his bachelor degree with honors. He wants to study medicine in France. At the Ministry of Education in Ouagadougou, unable to satisfy his request, he is advised to address the ministry. This is followed by a string of administrative proceedings, leading to delays, anomalies. And also, the fact that in Burkina Faso – as anywhere else in the world – it’s connections that set the bureaucratic machine in motion.

In the capital of Burkina Faso, a band of young people tries to survive and thrive vis-a-vis the thousand and one temptations. Adventures of a band of youngsters, living in a stripped district of Ouagadougou, who seek hopes. The easy way and ingeniousness compensate for the money which often is lacking. Sadness is banished of a resolutely optimistic way of life. Plunders and odd jobs constitute the daily newspaper of this struggle for life. The ones will succeed modestly, the others will fail more or less, but a great solidarity of group remains...

Ten year old Bila and his cousin Nopoko live happily in their Sahelian village. Bila is taken with an elderly woman, Sana, whom he calls «Yaaba», although the rest of the village treats her as a witch. One day, Nopoko falls ill with tetanus; her condition worsens. Nobody in the village, not even the healer, can help her - except, perhaps, Sana. Yaaba is one of Idrissa Ouedraogo’s major works and typical for his approach: "My Africa is not only about masks, dances and cottages, it's about love, friendship and reflecting on the world," says the maverick director, who is aware of Western film codes but refuses them, who remains rooted in Africa despite his many travels.

Powerful, moving and highly acclaimed, director Haile Gerima’s Sankofa is a masterpiece of cinema that has had a transformative impact on audiences since its release in 1993. This empowering film tells a story of slavery and of the African Diaspora from the perspective of the enslaved, challenging the romanticizing of slavery prevalent in American culture. Sankofa was developed from 20 years of research into the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the experiences of African slaves in the New World. The film represents complex characters and empowering moments of resilience that assert humanity in the face of subjugation. Unlike Hollywood’s depiction of slavery, Gerima presents the often suppressed history of slave resistance and rebellion and represents the enslaved as agents of their own liberation. The story begins with Mona (Oyafunmike Ogunlano), an African American model on a fashion shoot at the former slave castles in Cape Coast, Ghana. Mona undergoes a journey back in time and place to a slave plantation in North America where she becomes Shola, a house slave, and experiences the suffering of slavery firsthand. In becoming Shola and returning to her past culture and heritage, Mona is able to recover her lost slave identity and confront her ancestral experience. Shola’s interactions with her fellow slaves are marked with humanity and dignity, most notably with Shango (Mutabaruka), a rebellious field slave, and Nunu (Alexandra Duah), one of the few slaves to remember her life in Africa before being stolen by Europeans. The film’s narrative structure follows the concept of "Sankofa," an Akan word that signifies the recuperation of one’s past in order to comprehend the present and find one’s future. Allyson Nadia Field, ucla