These 13 films demonstrate African filmmakers’ expanding impact with uniquely told stories.
By Helena Olori
The 74th Berlinale has unveiled its official lineup, and delightfully, there is an impressive number of African films across its diverse programmes. Last year, Afrocritik published an article on how film festivals have become the game-changer for African filmmakers, and how the global recognition the industry enjoys is directly linked to the increased representation of African films and talents on international stages.
While the article discussed accessible film festivals for emerging filmmakers, a considerable number of African films have taken centre stage at renowned international events like Sundance, Cannes, Toronto, Locarno, and Berlinale. This underscores significant growth being recorded in African cinema, and how African filmmakers are expanding their footprints with uniquely told stories. It is truly an exciting era for the industry.
The annual Berlin International Film Festival, one of the world’s largest public film festivals, screens hundreds of films at multiple venues across Berlin. At its 73rd edition in 2023, numerous African titles were featured, including the world premiere of Babatunde Apalowo’s debut film, All Colours of the World Are Between Black and White and Apolline Traoré’s Sira, which secured the Panorama Audience Award.
Earlier this month, we published the African talents participating in the 2024 Berlinale Talent. Now, we explore the African films officially announced for the main festival programmes scheduled for February 15-25, 2024, in Berlin, Germany.
Demba
Demba is directed by New York-based Senegalese filmmaker, Mamadou Dia. It tells the story of 55-year-old eponymous Demba, who, on the brink of retirement in Northern Senegal, grapples with grief and newfound connections in the wake of his wife’s passing.
Though fictional, the film draws inspiration from the director’s personal experience with grief at the tender age of 12. “The film’s idea originated from a genuine question: how can a society that doesn’t have a word for ‘depression’ deal with it?”, he notes. It stars Ben Mahmoud Mbow, Awa Djiga Kane, Mamadou Sylla, Aicha Talla, and Saikou Lo.
In Demba, Director Dia explores the tension between grief and healing, belonging and estrangement, mental health and psychiatric disorders through the life of a middle-aged man.
The film, earlier announced as one of the recipients of the Berlinale World Cinema Fund, will have its world premiere as part of the 2024 Encounters programme.
Black Tea
One of the most anticipated programmes at the annual festival is the 2024 Berlinale Competition. This year’s line-up has 20 films competing for the Golden and Silver Bears, including Mauritanian-born Malian film director and producer, Abderrahmane Sissako’s Black Tea, set for its world premiere.
Described as “a lushly-lensed romance drama”, Black Tea follows Aya’s story, a young woman in her 30s who walks away from her wedding to start life anew in Guangzhou, China. In Guangzhou, she works at a tea export shop with Cai, a 45-year-old Chinese man who secretly initiates Aya into the tea ceremony. Their relationship slowly turns into a tender love story but is faced with the turmoil of their past and surrounding societal biases.
Starring Nina Mélo, Chang Han, and Wu Ke-Xi, Black Tea explores the intricacies of the Chinese-African relationship, drawing inspiration from Sissako’s encounter in “La Colline Parfumée” (The Perfumed Hill) a restaurant owned by an Afro-Chinese couple in Guangzhou. Black Tea is Sissako’s first outing since his Oscars-nominated Timbuktu in 2015.
Mé el Aïn
Also competing for the Berlinale Golden and Silver Bears is Mé el Aïn, a debut feature from Tunisia-born filmmaker and creator of the Oscars-nominated short, Brotherhood, Meryam Joobeur.
Translated as “Who Do I Belong To” in Arabic Language, the film follows a Tunisian woman caught between her maternal love and her search for the truth when her son returns home from war and unleashes a darkness throughout their village.
Mé el Aïn is a production of Tanit Films, Midi La Nuit and Instinct Blue, with distribution handled by Luxbox. The cast ensemble includes Salha Nasraoui, Mohamed Hassine Grayaa, Malek Mechergui, Adam Bessa, Dea Liane, Rayen Mechergui, and Chaker Mechergui.
Joobeur, who serves as the film’s writer and director, is renowned for her critically acclaimed short films, Weeds & Revolutions (2012), Born in the Maelstrom (2017), and Gods, Brotherhood (2018). Mé el Aïn will world premiere at the Berlinale Competition.
The Man With the Crooked Arm
After making history with his Namibia’s Oscars Debut, Under the Hanging Tree, director Perivi John Katjavivi, returns with a new series in which he revisits Namibia’s colonial history as “an extraordinary Western drama”.
The series is one of the ten projects selected for the 10th edition of Co-Pro Series 2024, a part of the Berlinale Co-Production Market.
This marks Katjavivi’s second appearance at the festival after his 2019 documentary-drama, Film Festival Film (co-directed by him) premiered at the Berlinale Forum Expanded.
Katjavivi will join other partaking filmmakers to pitch at CinemaxX on February 20, followed by a networking event and several hundred pre-planned one-on-one meetings between the producers and creators of the projects and potential co-producers, financiers and representatives of sales agents, funding institutions, broadcasters and platforms. The Man With the Crooked Arm will be produced by Katjavivi-led production outfit, Old Location Films.
Soon Comes Night
Also making an appearance at the Berlinale Co-Production Market is the South African series, Soon Comes Night, under the label Berlinale Series Market Selects.
Soon Comes Night, which premiered on Netflix on January 19, 2024, is created by South African filmmaker, Paul S Rowlston (known for Big Nunu’s Little Heist and Robbie Thorpe’s Fatal Seduction), based on real-life events. It follows Alex Shabane, a former freedom fighter now on the run, and Sakkie Oosthuizen, a detective hired to arrest Shabane, both determined to prove themselves. They soon find out that their intersecting paths represent two distinct sides of South Africa’s fight for freedom.
Soon Comes Night is a production of Ochre Moving Pictures, distributed by Red Arrow Studios International.
Certain Winds From the South
Ghanaian photographer and filmmaker, Eric Gyamfi’s socio-political drama, Certain Winds From the South will have its European premiere at the Berlinale Forum Expanded 2024.
The 40-minute film, shot in 2021, is an adaptation of Ama Ata Aidoo’s short story of the same title. It captures Issah, who visits his mother-in-law, M’ma Asana, to inform her of his decision to embark on a journey to the South of Ghana, in search of greener pastures. Through conversations and reflections from both characters and others, we uncover a vicious cycle of inequality that seeks to threaten their already precarious future.
Certain Winds From the South is co-produced by Moshood Hamza Balogun and stars Ayi Amadu, Nenesenor Abloso, Nasiba Mbabe Bawa, Pure Akan, and Dj Yamz. It had its initial opening in August, 2023 at Nuku´s Center for Photographic Research and Practice.
As Noites Ainda Cheiram Á Pôlvora
Mozambican filmmaker and 2019 Berlin Talent, Inadelso Cossa, takes on the roles of both director and actor in his latest documentary, As Noites Ainda Cheiram Á Pôlvora.
The film, which translates as “The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder” in Portuguese chronicles his visit to his grandparents’ village in Mozambique, where he spent his childhood during the civil war.
It delicately explores the darkness of the war his grandmother had him shielded from in the past, and spotlights the untold stories and experiences during the war. The 90-minute documentary is set to world premiere in the main Berlinale Forum. Inadelso Cossa is renowned for his short films, Xilunguine, a terra prometida (2011), Casa Branca: A Ponte (2016) as well as The Child Soldier and A Memory in Three Acts, both released in 2017.
Au Temps où le Docteur Frantz Fanon Était Chef de la Cinquième Division entre 1953 et 1956
This feature documentary by Algeria documentary filmmaker, Abdenour Zahzah, chronicles the factual events of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital during the mid-20th century when Dr Frantz Fanon served as the head of the fifth ward. He is also a renowned politician and decolonisation activist.
Translated as True Chronicles of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in the Last Century from French, the documentary sheds light on Dr Fanon’s visionary social therapy methods implemented during his tenure as a psychiatrist in Algeria between 1953 to 1956. The film serves as a sombre exploration of anti-racism, offering insight into the historical context and practices within the psychiatric hospital during that time. Au Temps où le Docteur Frantz Fanon Était Chef de la Cinquième Division entre 1953 et 1956 will world premiere at the Berlinale Forum.
Resonance Spiral
Directed by Marinho de Pina and Filipa César, this documentary turns its lens to the Mediateca Onshore in Malafo, a village in Guinea-Bissau. The Mediateca Onshore serves as both an archive and a club for agricultural and poetic (agropoetic) practices. With non-African filmmakers helming the production, the film captures the contradictions of depicting the community through Amílcar Cabral’s (Bissau-Guinean agricultural engineer and political activist) talks on feminism and the engaging discussion between the directors in the mangroves. Resonance Spiral will have its world premiere at the festival under the Berlinale Forum programme.
Kaddu Beykat
Kaddu Beykat, Letter from My Village, a 1975 documentary by one of Senegal’s legendary filmmakers, Safi Faye, is billed to premiere in the Berlinale Forum Special programme for noteworthy films, retrospectives, and unique cinematic experiences that hold cultural or historical significance.
The docu-fiction, originally banned in Senegal, is an emotive and visual love letter that follows Ngor and Coumba’s love story. The film will screen at the festival in honour of its luminary maker, Safi Faye who passed last year.
Disco Afrika: Une Histoire Malgache
Madagascar’s emerging filmmaker, Luck Razanajaona’s debut feature, Disco Afrika: Une Histoire Malgache, is one of the films gracing the screens at the Berlinale Generation 14plus programme (dedicated to coming-of-age stories, social issues, the complexities of adolescence, etc) where it will have its European premiere.
The film, which had its world premiere at the Marrakech Film Festival, spotlights Madagascar through the story of twenty-year-old Kwame who toils in clandestine sapphire mines. When an unexpected event takes him back to his hometown, he is confronted by the rampant corruption that plagues his country, and Kwame is forced to make a choice.
À quand l’Afrique?
Congolese film director and cinematographer, David-Pierre Fila, in his latest documentary, À quand l’Afrique?, which is French for “Which Way Africa?”, explores the aftermath of a nation drained of its underground riches. It is an urgent and necessary film.
Unveiling the recent and non-inevitable nature of daily violence, director Pierre Fila captures the intimate stories of those co-existing in a war-torn region of the Republic of the Congo, Angola, and Cameroon. As faces and voices emerge, the film highlights the resilience of the people and the challenge of dealing with a tumultuous past. À quand l’Afrique? is one of the 25 titles world premiering at the Panorama Dokumente segment.
Das leere Grab (The Empty Grave)
German-Tanzanian documentary Das leere Grab (The Empty Grave) will have its world premiere at the Berlinale Special 2024. It is the first-ever Tanzanian feature to be presented at the festival.
The film is a co-production between Kurhaus Production and Kijiweni Productions, directed by duo Agnes Lisa Wegner and Cece Mlay. It follows the emotional journey of two Tanzanian families seeking their stolen ancestors’ human remains that lay in the dark corridors of German museums. The Empty Grave is described as “a poignant exploration of colonial legacies and the courage to confront the past and seek a dignified future”.
Helena Olori is a talented multimedia journalist; she enjoys staying abreast with the latest happenings in the film industry and what makes the movie business tick. Connect with her on Instagram @heleena_olori or helena.olori@afrocritik.com