African classics

A key film of Africa in restored version! In this epic drama drawing on Bambara culture, which echoes mythic legends in an invented tale, a hero undergoes ordeals that allow him to renovate a decaying society. A young man must penetrate the secrets of the Komo cult (a real caste of specialist knowledge among the Bambara), whose members have abused their spiritual powers. Niamankoro suffers his father's wrath as he travels throughout the Bambara empire and Dogon and Peul societies.

Mory, a cowherd who rides a motorcycle mounted with a cow's skull, and Anta, a university student, have met in Dakar, Senegal's capital. Alienated and disaffected with Senegal and Africa, they long to go to Paris and work up different con schemes to raise the money. Mory steals clothing and money from a wealthy gay man who had brought him home, and he and Anta book passage on a ship to France. One of the most important, engaged and fascinating movies from Africa - selected for the documenta 2007.

Melodrama and thriller, social drama and love story in one, the masterly feature film by the Egyptian director Youssef Chahine, made in 1958, is located entirely on the station grounds. The old Madbouli is the owner of a kiosk at Cairo's main railway station. One day he finds a half-starved, poor man at the edge of the tracks. Madbouli feels sorry for the sad-looking, limping farmer Kenaoui and hires him as a flying newspaper salesman. At work, Kenaoui meets the beautiful Hanouma every day, who also earns her living at the station by supplying travellers with lemonade drinks. Kenaoui falls for the cheerful woman and makes it his goal to marry her. Lonely and in obsessive longing, he cuts out lightly dressed women from magazines in his hut at the edge of the train station in the evening, hanging his walls with them. Although he knows that Hanouma is already promised to the suitcase porter and trade unionist Abou Serih, one day he reveals his feelings to her and proposes to her. Her rejection, soaked with mockery and ridicule, drives Kenawi further into a rage-drenched obsession for Hanuma. Restored version.

Youssef Chahine’s adaptation of Marxist writer Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi’s 1953 novel, set in the 1930s, is an epic chronicle of life in a rural Egyptian village. The main plot concerns the unsuccessful attempts of the villagers to retain their access to water. Told that they can only irrigate their land a few days a month, several of the villagers are arrested for overwatering. Although the outside threat originally seems to unite the villagers, divisions resurface, and one of them is bought off by the local bey, representative of the ruling class in general.

Set in a small village in the Moroccan countryside, Alyam, Alyam tells a story culled from the lived reality of young men almost forty years ago while still remaining very much of the present day. A young man named Abdelwahed pins his dreams of a better life for himself and his family on travelling to France and finding work there. As the eldest of eight children, he becomes the principal caretaker and breadwinner for his family after his father passes away. He fills out forms and waits for his work permit to arrive. Meanwhile, Hlima, his recently widowed mother who’s reticent to let him go, tries in vain to dissuade him and enlists the help of Abdelwahed’s grandfather too. As the days flow by to the cadence of life in the countryside, marked by the hardships of farming, Abdelwahed waits. All he can do is wait. Straddling fiction and documentary, Alyam, Alyam is Ahmed El Maanouni’s first narrative feature, and the first Moroccan film ever to be selected at the Cannes Film Festival. Recently restored, the film’s splendor and finely crafted editing has become available once again for cinéphiles and new generations to discover.

Bab El-Oued, a popular district of Algier, in 1989, a few months after the riots. Young Boualem works six nights a week in a French bakery. On the rooftop of his apartment building the fundamentalists have installed a loudspeaker which is now broadcasting the Imam's word and the fundamentalist's hateful propaganda and therefore preventing Boualem from sleeping. Unable to stand the noise any longer, in a fit of madness, he destroys the loudspeaker and throws it into the sea. But he's quickly filled with guilt and apprehension for what he has done. Desecrating the property of the mosque is a sin, and now he finds himself in a relentless pursuit. The blunder is taken as a pretext by the Islamists to put the district under their control...

The story of a blind dervish named Bab'Aziz and his spirited granddaughter, Ishtar. Together they wander the desert in search of a great reunion of dervishes that takes place just once every thirty years. With faith as their only guide, the two journey for days through the expansive, barren landscape.

It is in a village lost at the bottom of the desert, a young teacher was named, to teach, but there is no school. Through the yant glance foudro of a girl, our teacher is aspired by another world to the suspended time where côtoient Thousand and One Nights. Coordinate all the hidden force of an underground memory. One of the most beautiful desert movies, in which storyteller and painter Nacer Khemir tells us the journey of a young teacher that arrives in a desert village.

The first feature film ever produced in Mail, Baara (The Porter) is about a young man caught in the growing political and economic tensions of urban Africa. Balla Diarra is a worker in the capital city of Bamako who struggles to survive on his meagar income. After his friend is murdered by an unfeeling factory boss, he must confront increasingly violent choices. Set in a modern city rather than a mythical past or traditional village, Baara offers a portrait of African life not often seen on the American screen.

A young mute woman is raped and becomes pregnant, with disastrous consequences within her family. The film also sketches the social/economic situation in urban Mali in the 1970s, particularly in relation to the treatment of women.

In Colobane, people expect the return of Linguère Ramatou, a former local girl now rumored to be richer than the World Bank. But her generosity has its conditions: she offers a check of ten billion for the death of Dramaan Drameh who refused to admit that he was the father of her child 30 years ago. "Life made made me a whore, now I'm turning the world into a brothel" she tells the citizens of Colobane.

After working as a babysitter for a French family in Dakar, a young Senegalese woman is invited to come to France as a governess. But in the West she is only "the black girl" for everyone. Deprived of her freedom, her dignity and her identity, she sees only a radical last act of resistance. Ousmane Sembène's feature film debut was one of the very first African feature films and is based on a newspaper report about the suicide of an African housemaid. From this, Sembène formed a parable about neo-colonialism and the new slave trade.

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

The story of a woman who searches through the country for her husband, a resistant, while the war for independence is raging. She finds him at last and saves his life. When peace finally arrives, they have to learn how to be together again and start living in a destroyed land.

Ngando and Ndomé are in love. Ngando wishes to marry Ndomé but her family reminds him that the traditional dowry must be settled. Unfortunately, Ngando is poor and unable to fulfil the tradition. Ndomé is pregnant and bears his child. According to the village tradition, she must take a husband, at least one who can afford to pay the dowry. The villagers decide that Ndomé should marry Ngando’s uncle, who has already three sterile wives. In despair, the young man kidnaps his daughter upon the day of the traditional feast. An African Romeo and Juliet story.

After refusing the sexual advances of her village chief and her father’s authority, a young woman runs away from home and goes to town. There she meets several members of her family and tries to start her life from scratch. She enrolls at a high school and makes new friends. However, she realizes that social relations in town also depend on sexual favors and that around her everyone has given in to that practice. When she loses the only man she loved, the girl returns to her village and in a fit of rage sets it on fire.

The Sparrow fascinates with its parallel strands of action. The various ways of encountering a criminal trader, namely by a police officer and a journalist, are ultimately only traces that lead to the tip of an iceberg: the corruption of Egyptian society on the eve of the Six-Day War.

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.

The gods have declared the drought of the country. There seems to be no hope. A holy man summoned by the king requires the sacrifice of a young woman to put an end to their anger. A young man in love decides to go in search of water to save the girl from a tragic end, but when he returns with good news it's too late: the genie had his satisfaction and Toula has already disappeared in the holy swamp.