Africa is one of the best travel destinations in the world. It’s a lovely jeu d’ésprit. Every year, sub-Saharan Africa misses out on about $30 billion as productivity is compromised by water and sanitation problems. A terrible drought means the failure of the millet and groundnut (a restricted crop inherited from the colonial administration) and a young man called Ngor cannot afford to marry the woman he loves. Last modified on Fri 2 Oct 2020 06.14 EDT. Movies with 40 or more critic reviews vie for their place in history at Rotten Tomatoes. There are 9.2 million Africans that are victims of modern slavery as of 2016, accounting for 23 percent of total global modern slavery. Searching for streaming and purchasing options ... Common Sense is a nonprofit organization. With Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Robert Morley, Peter Bull. A magical quest narrative from the Malian film-maker Souleymane Cissé, it was a hit at the 1987 Cannes film festival, where it won the Jury prize. Its seaside setting of sand, perpetually audible surf and the plainest possible whitewashed buildings entirely without advertising or any sign of commerce gives it a fabular quality. Finally, Cairo Station virtually attains the air of a tragedy, observing classical unities of time and place. In some future dystopian time, a spaceship containing aliens who have been expelled from their native planet hovers over a city. The Senegalese writer and director Ousmane Sembène is often described as the “father of African cinema” and this was his debut movie. On DVD/Streaming. 100 Must-See African-American Films Topping this list are Boyz N the Hood, Claudine, Love Jones, Precious, Set It Off, Foxy Brown, Stormy Weather, Eve's Bayou, Carmen Jones, Hoop Dreams, Shaft, Malcom X, The Color Purple, Lilies of the Field, City of God, … Three Kings. Dominique Loreau’s fascinating docu-fictional feature Divine Carcass is something to compare with Terence Rattigan’s The Yellow Rolls-Royce. Their affair triggers a macabre spasm of sexual obsession and violence relating to Parker’s memories of military service in the Democratic Republic of Congo, apparently as part of a UN force. (We see this man only once, in a sequence at the film’s beginning, wandering across a wilderness.) age 6+. You can watch as much as you want, whenever you want without a single commercial – all for one low monthly price. Watch Thousands of handpicked Nigerian, Ghanaian, and African movies and TV shows with no ads. Their mother is not helpful when they ask what has become of their dad, replying only that he is “irresponsible”, a term that baffles them. The film is concerned with that mystical “yeelen”, or “brightness” that creates the world anew each morning. In this way, it serves as a curious time capsule. Ada, ironically, is on the verge of a far better life than any Souleiman can dream of – that of a rich married woman. 7. It is a seductive mystery. Then something strange and unexpected happens. This is an extravagant revenge melodrama, or Beauty-and-the-Beast fable, from the Egyptian film-maker Henry Barakat, based on a novel by Taha Hussein. The film, by David O. Russell, is silly, creative, and a whole lot of fun as it follows Mark Wahlberg and George Clooney as U.S. soldiers behind enemy lines in Iraq, attempting to steal stolen Kuwaiti gold. Mac & Devin Go To High School (2012) Two of the biggest names in hip-hop, Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa, play the titular characters in this movie. The following 200 pages are in this category, out of approximately 287 total. Caring, progressive politicians from Earth have allowed these weirdly shaped creatures (nicknamed “prawns”) to settle in an area outside the city, which becomes a lawless zone called District 9. The film’s director, Apolline Traoré, was born in Burkina Faso and educated in the US before returning to the country of her birth and working with Idrissa Ouédraogo. From Tiana, the first Black Disney princess, to Misty Copeland, the first Black principal dancer at the American Ballet Theater, the hardworking heroines in these films work hard and overcome adversity to accomplish their goals. © 2021 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Shula is a Zambian orphan who is bizarrely accused by her townspeople of being a witch; she is exiled, but then brought under the wing of the unspeakable Mr Banda, a slippery public official who has a very strange side hustle. He runs a “witch camp” into which Shula is briskly enrolled: all her classmates are elderly women. This article will look at ten countries to visit across the continent. The subversive energy of Touki Bouki made Mambéty a one-man African New Wave. Lotz gives the story a tragic dimension. This classic movie from Gillo Pontecorvo is an extraordinary recreation of the 1950s Algerian uprising against French imperial rule. Misconceptions about Africa are commonplace in the West. Africa Squeaks; Africa United (2010 film) Africa: The Serengeti; Africadalli Sheela; African Cats; African Diary; African Manhunt; Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold; Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls; Anthony Adverse; Armour of God (film) Armour of God II: Operation Condor; Arthur Christmas; Ashanti (1979 film) The movie begins with a shot of a sunrise on the distant horizon, which caused the film to be compared to 2001: A Space Odyssey. 8 of 52. He and the other menfolk come to live with them for one month a year – the “season of men”. This article was amended on 2 October to correct the description of Nouadhibou as a “little village”. The Contract. A droll, mysterious meditation on the nature of colonialism. It is a beautiful, deadpan, black comic touch. showcase the past decade’s classics online, French-Senegalese actor-turned-director Mati Diop, to revive the memory of one of African cinema’s occult jewels. There is such poignancy and tenderness in this film. To earn money, he has to journey to the capital, Dakar, where he is horribly exploited, and returns with a tale of woe. It never harasses or hectors its audience; the performances are calm and deeply felt, and so is the way they are shaped and photographed. Watch Quality, Legal, 100% Licensed Movies and TV Series. Fortunately, there are movies with inspiring African American role models who positively affect girls' ideas of their self-worth. Get it now. It crams the extraordinarily dramatic events in the lives of two young boys into just 81 minutes, while always maintaining its unhurried narrative. Films set in pre-colonial sub-Saharan Africa, Films about traditional African religions, Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls, Doraemon: New Nobita's Great Demon—Peko and the Exploration Party of Five, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, Hector and the Search for Happiness (film), https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Films_set_in_Africa&oldid=951396607, Template Category TOC via CatAutoTOC on category with 301–600 pages, CatAutoTOC generates standard Category TOC, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 16 April 2020, at 23:27. Top 25 Hotels in Africa - Tripadvisor Travelers’ Choice Awards: See the best hotels in the world as determined from ratings by travelers like you. One of Spike Lee's most celebrated films, School Daze explores the themes of colorism, Greek life, and activism at a fictional Historically Black College. It's your choice. So his almost biblically epic story of resistance begins, a story of opposition to brutality and bad faith. Here are the best- and worst-rated space movies from 'Interstellar' and 'The Martian' to 'Apollo 13' and 'Gravity'. Souleiman’s behaviour is upsetting and mysterious, sending Ada a text asking her to meet in the middle of the night; is it real, or a sinister trap? Lists of recent good movies and award winners. Sembène’s film grasped the nature of empire and servitude: big themes coupled with a strong intimate storytelling style. In this Best Picture winner based on an 1853 memoir by Solomon Northrup, Chiwitel Ejiofor plays Northrup, a black man born free in New York who is kidnapped and sold into slavery. Zambian-born director Rungano Nyoni has created a film that is technically British, but sports with ideas and tropes that have long been present in African cinema: the innocence of the child and the pain of the ostracised outsider. A shy, bookish student called Parker is hired to teach English in a high school. Stream and Watch Instantly. Directed by Sydney Pollack. It is the story of the Algerian revolution from the second world war to the war of independence (the pre-history, perhaps, to the story told by Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers). The movie ricochets and pinballs around from scene to scene and idea to idea, with a loose, rangy vitality, but when it comes to the crunch, it seems that only Anta has the passionate need to escape Senegal; Mory is weirdly constrained by ties of loyalty to the place, as if only Senegal will allow his machismo to flourish, although his motorbike comes symbolically to grief. Three Kings is a film about the first Gulf War, made before the start of the second war. It follows a young street criminal who steals a car and discovers baby. In the text below, the top 10 facts about human trafficking in Africa are presented. But soon Shula is pressed into service, going on talkshows, helping the police with her magic powers and assisting the farming community by miraculously bringing rain to the region. Amna seeks out the man who led her sister astray, gets a job as a maid in his house and plots to kill him, but he falls in love with her, and perhaps also she with him. Although a person “of good report”, with a good reputation and references, he clearly has sexual designs on Nolitha (does the name hint at Lolita? A delicate, witty film that straddles fact and fiction, set in southern Senegal where the director, Safi Faye, grew up, with Faye in effect narrating by reading aloud a supposed letter about events in her home village. A ferociously powerful, yet subtle and complex, performance from Deon Lotz is at the centre of Oliver Hermanus’s uncompromising and shocking South African-set movie. They are suspicious of her, but she shows them a kindness that they are not used to and soon there is a bond between her and the children. Hogwarts it ain’t. He plays François, a middle-aged white Afrikaaner family man with a secret passion that he indulges with like-minded white guys. “Can I help you?” asks an assistant, directly to camera, clearly addressing the seething would-be assassin. Top 10 Facts About Human Trafficking in Africa. After it has broken down for the last time, it is left by the side of the road where a sculptor refashions it into the form of a Voodoo god that presides over the population of a nearby village. From ‘Judas and the Black Messiah’ and ‘BlacKkKlansman’ to classics like ‘Boomerang’ and ‘Boyz n the Hood,’ here are the best black movies of the past 30 years. It is the story of a 1955 Peugeot, and all the people who come to own it in Cotonou, Benin. Kemi Adetiba is the director of this movie. The African Queen: John Huston: War in German East Africa: A, R 1951 Italy The Caiman of the Piave † Il caimano del Piave: Giorgio Bianchi: Espionage on the front of the Piave river in 1918 D 1951 Italy Without a Flag: Senza bandiera: Lionello De Felice: Italian agents discover an Austrian spy ring in Zürich D 1952 Italy Brothers of Italy: Fratelli d'Italia Aicha is married to a businessman, who is away in Tunis, and must live on the island in a kind of purdah with all her husband’s sisters-in-law. Her ordeal is intercut with her previous life in Senegal, which is hardly happy in comparison. Cheryl Dunye directs and stars in this microbudget indie about an African-American lesbian searching for an uncredited black actress from a 1930s film. All that is tested when one of the children falls ill and Sana gets the blame. The force and intensity of this film, and the way Hermanus controls the movie’s emotional weather, are impressive. Set some time in the distant past (or perhaps the timeless present or mysterious future), it is the story of a father-son confrontation. The bride has insisted they do not have sex until their wedding night, which cranks up the tension and mishaps. Three Kings. School Daze. I was born in Namibia, my parents were born in Namibia and even my grand parents were born in Namibia. In 20th-century colonial Kenya, a Danish baroness/plantation owner has a passionate love affair with a free-spirited big-game hunter. (You'll spot a young Spike Lee, Giancarlo Esposito, and Tisha-Campbell Martin.) But, for me, his great film is Abouna, a classic of African cinema: rich in understated humanity, a film about love and loss, imbued with profound tenderness towards children and childhood. Mahamet-Saleh Haroun, a film-maker from Chad, has been widely praised for features such as Daratt and his recent excellent A Season in France. Abdallah is a teenage boy who feels ill at ease in his homeland; he is heading for Europe for a new life, and that continent’s complex, dramatic pull is most keenly felt during a grainy flashback, showing a local woman who once travelled to France for a man’s sake, and felt only loneliness and alienation. She is kept as a servant, never let out of the house and is sexually harassed by her employers and their guests. Finally, the authorities decide to move them to an internment camp, but there is evidence that the prawns are still in contact with their hulking mothership, which is providing them with the means to rebel. In WWI Africa, a gin-swilling riverboat captain is persuaded by a strait-laced missionary to use his boat to attack an enemy warship. First African American Disney princess is a good role model. French-Senegalese actor-turned-director Mati Diop created a modern classic of poetic cinema in Atlantique, tapping into African cinema’s twin traditions of realism and fable with a compelling docu-supernatural enigma, a winter’s tale of a film with a dimension of strangeness unselfconsciously baked into the movie’s ostensible normality. A young woman, Amna, witnesses the death of her sister at the hands of her uncle, who supposedly had no choice because she had “dishonoured” the family. Download Protected Movies for Offline viewing. It was a reference to a central image in Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki: the two glamorous scofflaws and rebels of Senegal on a bike – like Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in in the 1960 version of Breathless or Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde. Stream, Cast, or Download the Best African Movies. The Wedding Party (2016) Nollywood has become a cultural phenomenon and commercial cinema powerhouse in Africa, and Kemi Adetiba’s The Wedding Party … Two brothers, aged 15 and eight, are haunted by the disappearance of their father, who has deserted the family home. All human life is here: the phrase really does apply to Youssef Chahine’s tragicomic masterpiece. A poor farmer called Ahmad is drafted into the French army and returns determined to free Algeria from the French yoke. The movie has a very interesting storyline where a mother tries her very best to convince her rich son who is a very successful businessman to get married but the son is not interested in settling down. Chahine conducts his big cast with uproarious energy, immediacy and freshness; he has tremendous stylised set pieces, including a railway-carriage rock’n’roll number performed by a group gloriously credited as Mike and his Skyrockets. As a film that declines to press its dramatic attentions, Waiting for Happiness needs an investment of patience, repaying it with a sweet and subtle portrait of an island community. They affectionately call her “Yaaba” (Grandma). recententertainmentnews.org. Finally, the boys are sent away to religious school and one meets a girl, a late-flowering love story that deepens and complicates their own relationship as one boy is to leave the world of childhood much sooner than his lonely brother. A brief feature based on one of his own short stories, it is a tale of sexual politics and the cultural norms of empire. She brings to it her own distinctive subversion and comedy, which makes I Am Not a Witch irresistible. 10. A common stereotype about Africa is that the continent … Two years ago, Beyoncé and Jay-Z did their bit to revive the memory of one of African cinema’s occult jewels, thought to be the first experimental film from Africa. He is gay, has orgies that are presented with a strange, fierce joylessness, and is becoming fixated on his nephew. “ET go home!” could be the poster tagline for this clever and prescient sci-fi satire about migrants and xenophobia, from South African film-maker Neill Blomkamp. A simple, gentle tale from Idrissa Ouédraogo, which unfolds at the walking-pace tempo of classic African cinema; using non-professionals, its depiction of rural communities perhaps owes something to Satyajit Ray. Tourism in Africa increased by 2% in 2014, according to the UN World Tourism Organization report of that year. Diop recently came out of retirement to play a community elder in Maïmouna Doucouré’s Cuties. It is the story of a woman and her two daughters, and the female community that nurtures and imprisons them on the Tunisian island of Djerba. All rights reserved. 9. I have some misgivings about the film’s ending, a sexual assault that is of a recognisable arthouse type, and yet it is rare to see a rape scene where the victim is a man. With Meryl Streep, Robert Redford, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Michael Kitchen. The Best! Cairo Station is the venue for a blazingly passionate drama about Qinawi, a lame newspaper vendor, played by Chahine himself, and his unrequited desire for Hanuma, the Bardot-ish lemonade seller. Nollywood has become a cultural phenomenon and commercial cinema powerhouse in Africa, and Kemi Adetiba’s The Wedding Party is the most successful example: it became the highest-grossing international Nigerian film. Directed by John Huston. This category has the following 16 subcategories, out of 16 total. The entire movie is wrapped in a beautiful, humorous tone. The movie is a moving portrait of the redemption of a forgotten boy from a … Jay-Z posed on a motorbike with a big pair of zebu horns on the handlebars and Beyoncé sat behind him. This article will highlight the top 10 African movies you must see. Cast to your Chromecast equipped TV. This film from the Mauritanian writer-director Abderrahmane Sissako is beguiling in its gentleness. Africa Paradis; Africa Screams; Africa Speaks! Tsotsi (2005) | South Africa / UK. Mory and Anta are a young couple deeply disenchanted with their Senegalese homeland, who dream of escaping to Europe. A good example is South Africa, which is also called the Rainbow Nation because of the diversity it is known for when it comes to matters of skin color. Africa is a Continent Full of Corruption, Poverty and War. (Nyoni was brought up in Wales, and it is interesting to wonder if her title had echoes of Connie Booth’s baffled proclamation of innocence during the witch-trial scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.) The 15 Best Horror Movies That Spark Ocean, Water Fears These Are the Scariest Demon Possession and Exorcism Horror Movies Grab the Kids and Check out These Family Friendly Horror Flicks The film stars the Senegalese actor Mbissine Thérèse Diop as Diouana, a young woman from Dakar who comes to work as a nanny in the south of France, which turns out to be far from the leisured paradise she had hoped for. Best of Rotten Tomatoes. It is a raucous comedy of upmarket aspirational yearnings set in Lagos, where a young gallery owner is about to marry her boyfriend, an IT entrepreneur, to the excitement of her parents who want to make it a sensationally lavish wedding. Here are the best Black movies to watch tonight, including comedies like Tyler Perry's 'Why Did I Get Married' to award-winning dramas like 'Moonlight.' The Princess and the Frog. Your support powers our independent journalism, Available for everyone, funded by readers. My favourite moment is the shot that Chahine contrives after Qinawi is convinced of the need for violent action: we immediately cut to an extraordinary selection of fearsome knives, big and small, hanging up in what appears to be an elaborate and preposterous outdoor knife shop. Tomatometer rankings of the top 100 best movies of 2020 and all time. The movie meanders gently from character to character in the town of Nouadhibou on Mauritania’s coast. Netflix is a streaming service that offers a wide variety of award-winning TV shows, movies, anime, documentaries, and more on thousands of internet-connected devices. ), a teenage girl in his class. A young man called Niankoro leaves the family home on a mission to find the spiritual enlightenment and strength he will need in the inevitable showdown with the father who deserted him and his mother. One of the most popular and critically acclaimed Civil War films ever made, "Glory" is the stirring account of the 54th Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the second African-American unit assembled during the Civil War. This amount accounts for approximately five percent of the region’s gross domestic product (GDP), exceeding the total amount of foreign aid sent to sub-Saharan Africa … (Release Year: 2009) Continue reading Watch review. Two kids in Burkina Faso are playing outside their village when they see Sana, an old woman who has been cast out, apparently for being a witch. As the bombing campaign begins in Algiers, with nail-bitingly tense sequences in crowded cafes, French army officer Colonel Mathieu is entrusted by the government with putting down the revolt, and he embarks on a ruthlessly targeted campaign of isolating terrorist cells, torturing them for the names further up the pyramid chain until the key figures at the top are obliterated. Ada is a young woman in Dakar engaged to be married to the wealthy, obnoxious Omar, but she is in love with Souleiman, an exploited labourer who is thinking of making the dangerous migrant journey overseas. As Qinawi’s love becomes more obsessive, the mood darkens and elements of Hitchcock and Powell creep in. This Algerian film, directed by Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, is a resounding three-hour epic with lavish widescreen spectacle. The movie is based on the life and writings of Baroness Karen Blixen, a Danish woman who, despairing that she would be single forever, married her lover's brother, moved out to Kenya in East Africa, ran a coffee plantation on the slopes of Kilimanjaro and later, when the plantation was bankrupt and the dream was finshed, wrote books about her experiences under the name Isak Dinesan. Jahmil XT Qubeka’s cult classic from South Africa is a noir drama-thriller with weird fantasy outbreaks, concerning forbidden love, a troubled past and psychological breakdown. As the UK’s leading African film festivals showcase the past decade’s classics online, we pick 20 great landmarks from the continent’s dazzling movie-making history, Thu 1 Oct 2020 08.26 EDT It is the second-highest-grossing Nollywood movie ever, only surpassed by its sequel. They need money fast and the only way to get it is crime: stealing, fraud, prostitution or burglary. One of South Africa’s most successful films, Tsotsi (which translates to ‘thug’) is set in a city slum in Johannesburg. I have traveled to several countries in Africa and have done allot of research on the ones I have not visited and I think I have a pretty clear idea of how it is. This list may not reflect recent changes (learn more). Atlantique is about the return of the repressed, or the suppressed: the spirit of exploited labour rises up and this becomes a ghost story or a revenge story. Borders is her third feature, a road movie about four very different women travelling across beautifully evoked landscapes from Senegal to Nigeria, having melodramatic, shocking or comic episodes on the hot and dusty road. South Africa The 20 Best South African Songs of the Month (February) Featuring Nasty C , Focalistic , Kabza De Small , Blxckie , Jobe London and more. At first, it is the property of an overseas development worker, and then his cook, Joseph, who sneakily uses it for his unlicensed taxi service. In 2001, George W. Bush famously commented that "Africa is a nation that suffers from terrible disease", thereby reducing the planet's second-largest continent to a single country. Mathieu crisply briefs his men: “The culprits are presumed to be Muslim, so they will be able to hide more easily in the Arab quarters.” Ironically, Mathieu’s experience in Vietnam and the French resistance appears to prefigure his own ultimate failure here. A lucid and compassionate film from the Tunisian writer-director Moufida Tlatli that allows its audience unhurried access to a powerful and deeply engaging family drama. To buy the Guardian’s Black history wallcharts, visit the Guardian bookshop and use code 15CHART for a 50% discount. Here, you can enjoy crystal blue beaches, majestic wildlife, and a wealth of culture and history. In sad, but witty, sequences the film shows us the boys’ forlorn attempt to find their father (at the cinema, the younger boy is convinced he can see him on screen and shouts: “Dad it’s me!”). But the couple’s relationship is demurely old-fashioned. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1975 (seeing off Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger and Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser). Eligible movies are ranked based on their Adjusted Scores. Tlatli interleaves the past and present as naturally as the verses of a song, with a narrative mastery that she makes look easy. I am African, well I'm Namibian which is in Africa, so I guess I can call myself African.