Library of African Cinema

This critically acclaimed video series from California Newsreel tells the story of Africa through its own cinema. For further information on these or any of their other videos, check out the California Newsreel website. The videos listed below are held by the Ekstrom Library. For more complete information on individual titles check the Libraries on-line catalog, Minerva.

Africa dreaming
Four short films on love from Namibia, Tunisia, Senegal, and Mozambique. // Sophia's homecoming / directed by Richard Pakleppa // Sabriya / written and directed by Abderrahmane Sissako // So be it / written, directed and produced by Joseph Gai Ramaka // The gaze of the stars / directed by João Ribeiro. Call Number: PN 1995.9 .A43 A38 1997

Afrique, je te plumerai = Africa, I'm going to fleece you
A compelling and sardonic essay on the history of colonialism in Cameroon, and by extension, on the African continent. Focuses on historical as well as contemporary European cultural domination, particularly in the publishing and media industry. Call Number: DT 572 .A35 1992

Aimeé Ceésaire: a voice for history
This series introduces the celebrated Martinican author who coined the term "negritude" and lauched the movement called the "Great Black Cry." This three part series details the life and work, both literary and political, of Aimeé Ceésaire. Shows his influence on many generations of African American authors as well as French literature. Call Number: PQ 3949 .C44 Z52 1994 (3 videotapes)

Allah Tantou, a la grace de Dieu = Allah Tantou, God's will be done
Through home movies, old newsreels, letters and fictional reconstruction of imprisonment, this film examines the life of the filmmaker's father, a diplomat under the Sekou Toure regime, who later disappeared into the Guinean gulag. Film reevaluates the turbulent decade of African independence and discusses its relevance to the new political order on the continent. Call Number: DT 543.8 .A42 1991

Black Athena
Explores the debate around Prof. Martin Bernal's book on the African origins of Greek culture, Black Athena. Leading classicists and Egyptologists discuss Bernal's indictment that 19th century scholars systematically denied the connections between Greece and the non-European cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean. Call Number: DF 78 .B53 1991

Le bouillon d'awara = Awara soup
Introduces the viewer to one of the worl'd most multi-cultural communities, a global village in the backcountry of French Guiana. Call Number: F 2471 .A1 B69 1995

Ça twiste à Poponguine = Rocking Poponguine
A comedy set during the last week before Christmas, 1964, in a remote beachside village, where the local teenagers are divided into rival cultural camps. Call Number: PN 1997 .C13 1993

Chef! = Chief // La tête dans les nuages = Head in the clouds
In ... Chef!, Teno locates the roots of Africa's authoritarian regimes in the patriarchal family, reinforced by traditional kingship and the colonial experience. Teno insists that this film was not planned but imposed itself on him during a visit to his ancestral village, Bandjoun, in the Ghomala speaking region of Western Cameroon. He had gone to film dances dedicating a monument to King Kamga Joseph II, the filmmakers' great grand uncle, but the ceremony soon turned into a celebration of one-man rule, in particular Cameroonian President Paul Biya's Teno investigates the ties between unaccountable government and an unproductive economy in La tête dans les nuages. Kleptocracy has become an accepted fact of Cameroonian life described by the proverb: "The goat grazes where it is tied." The government controlled formal sector, like its colonial predecessor, is essentially parasitical. An informal sector has emerged parallel to it which increasingly supplies the daily subsistence needs of the people. Irene, for example, works at the Ministry of Education for an unreliable and inadequate salary; she earns the money she needs to eat from selling beignets in the market. She also belongs to a tontine or "credit union" which offers its members a pool of capital to draw on for business ventures. Such clubs, ubiquitous among African market women, help fill the economic and social vacuum left by the decay of traditional society and the unresponsiveness of the formal banking sector. Call Number: None. Ask at Ekstrom Library Media service desk.

Dôlè
The action takes place in Libreville, the capital of Gabon. This is where Mougler and his friends Baby Lee, Joker, Akson and Bezingo, four fifteen-year-old boys, live. These boys have to fend for themselves, except for Mougler who lives with Maradou, his mother. The gang is tired of thieving and is full of dreams of more ambitious jobs. The opportunity is given to them with the extremely popular betting kiosks in Dôlè. The temptation is great, and so are the risks. Call Number: PN 1997 .D635 2001

Everyone's child
In a rural village in Zimbabwe, Tamari and Itai are devastated following the tragic death of both their parents. For the children this is a time of fear and survival as family and neighbors turn their heads. The social climate in the city is just as hostile as it is in the village. In the end it is only tragedy that can bridge the gulf of denial between their two worlds and make the community realize that these are everyone's children. Call Number: PN 1997 .E94 1996

Faat Kine
The deceptively light domestic drama of Faat Kine, a gas station operator born, significantly, the same year as Senegalese independence, 1960. Call Number: PN 1997 .F323 2000

Femmes aux yeux ouverts = Women with open eyes
Surveys social conditions faced by women in Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal and Benin, including circumcision, forced marriage, AIDS, and economic repression. Examines grass-roots efforts toward education and improvement as Africa opens to democracy. Call Number: HQ 1788 .F45 1994

Finzan
Tells the story of two women's rebellion. Nanyuma, a young widow, refuses her brother-in-law, the village fool, when he asserts his traditional right to "inherit" her. Fili, a young girl sent from the city by her conservative father, is brutally circumcised by the village women who are scandalized that she resists the age-old custom. Call Number: PN 1997 .F559 1990

Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask
Explores for the first time on film the pre-eminent theorist of the anti-colonial movements of this century. Fanon's two major works, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, were pioneering studies of the psychological impact of racism on both colonized and colonizer. Call Number: CT 2628 .F35 F726 1995

Le Grand blanc de Lambareéneé = The great white man of Lambareéneé
Provides a facinating revisionist perspective on Albert Schweitzer. It goes beyond the facile iconoclasm to become a deeply felt lament for a missed opportunity between Europe and Africa. Call Number: PN 1997 .G678 1995

Guimba: tyrant in his time
A tyrant throws his city into conflict and chaos when he allows his randy, dwarf son to reject an arranged marriage to the slim local beauty in order for him to pursue the girl's larger, married mother. The tyrant then sets his own eyes on the girl, making the situation even worse. Call Number: PN 1997 .G842 1995

Hyenas
A wealthy woman, who was forced out of her village and into a life of prostitution, returns to her home village and offers the villagers a trillion dollars in return for their assistance in exacting revenge against the man who forced her into prostitution. Call Number: PN 1997 .H94 1993

Keita: the heritage of the griot
Based on one of the most important works of African oral literature, the Sundjata epic. When a djâeliba, a master griot or bard, arrives mysteriously at the home of Mabo Keèita to teach him "the meaning of his name," the boy and griot are inevitably brought into conflict with his Westernized mother and schoolteacher, who have rejected African tradition. Call Number: DT 532.2 .K44 1994

Language you cry in
The film tells an amazing scholarly detective story reaching across hundreds of years and thousands of miles from 18th century Sierra Leone to the Gullah people of present-day Georgia. It recounts the even more remarkable saga of how African-Americans have retained links with their African past through the horrors of the middle passage, slavery and segregation. Call Number: DT 14 .L25 1999

Long night's journey into day
For over forty years, South Africa was governed by the most notorious form of racial domination since Nazi Germany. When it finally collapsed, those who had enforced apartheid's rule wanted amnesty for their crimes. Their victims wanted justice. As a compromise, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was formed. As it investigated the crimes of apartheid, the Commission brought together victims and perpetrators to relive South Africa's brutal history. By revealing the past instead of burying it, the TRC hoped to pave the way to a peaceful future. Call Number: DT 1757 .L66 2000

Lumumba
This film recounts Lumumba's 200 day rule culminating with his assassination. Reveals how a weakened democratic movement succumbed to the only well-financed and organized force in the country--the military. Call Number: DT 663 .L8 L6

Monday's girls
Examines the traditional African tribal roles and the emerging modern African lifestyle. Call Number: GN 483.3 .M66 1993

Patient abuse: South Africa's struggle for AIDS treatment
The film presents the early missteps by the South African government health officials concerning AIDS. Film follows the controversial statements made by current President Thabo Mbeki which advance doubts that HIV is the cause of AIDS. Call Number: PN 1997 .P185 2001

Petite vendeuse de Soleil = The little girl who sold the sun
This parable uses the struggles of a young crippled girl in Dakar trying to earn her living in the market place selling newspapers to mirror Africa's role in the international marketplace. Call Number: PN 1997 .P47 1999

Pieces d'identites
A Congolese king searches for his daughter in Brussels where for a time he loses his royal fetishes, his identity, but finds a friend, a local cabdriver with a secret identity. Call Number: PN 1997 .P48 1998

Rouch in reverse
French ethnologist/filmmaker, Jean Rouch discusses his work with Manthia Diawara. Call Number: GN 21 .R63 R68 1995

Sango Malo
Sango Malo is a tale of two school teachers and two philosophies of education. Call Number: PN 1997 .S27 1991

Son of Africa
A docu-drama based on the book, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Oloudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vaasa the African, which was the first influential slave autobiography. When it was published in 1789, it fueled a growing anti-slavery movement in the U.S. and England. This production employs dramatic reconstruction, archival material and interviews with scholars. Call Number: HT 869 .E6 A3 1996

Taafe fanga = skirt power
In an eighteenth century Dogon village, the women terrorize the men into assuming traditional women's roles. Call Number: PN 1997 .T23 1997

Tableau ferraille
Tells the story of an idealistic young politician's rise and fall. Daam, a well-intentioned but vacillating European-trained politician, must choose between two social paradigms exemplified by his two wives. The film offers a view of how modernization, as practiced in today's Africa, corrodes traditional communities and retards grassroots development. Call Number: PN 1997 .T33 1997

These hands
Surveys a typical workday in the lives of impoverished women in Tanzania who manually mine gravel used for making concrete for urban building projects. Call Number: HQ 1798.5 .T44 1992

Three tales from Senegal
Three Senegalese short films that adapt the ancient African art of storytelling to the modern medium of film. Call Number: GR 352.72 .W64 T47 1994

Udju azul di Yonta = The blue eyes of Yonta
Offers a portrait of the disillusionment of the revolutionary generation in Guinea-Bissau and the vibrant, if unintended, society which developed after independence in 1973. Call Number: PN 1997 .U277 1994

La Vie est belle
La vie est belle tells the rags to riches story of a poor rural musican who realizes that to succeed in today's music world he must go to the city and break into radio and television. Call Number: PN 1997 .V53 1987

La Vie sur terre
A film about the significance of the start of the 21st Century for people still struggling to enter the 20th. The solution was to improvise a 'fictional documentary' out of daily life in Sokolo. Call Number: PN 1997 .V53 1998

Wend Kuuni = Le don de Dieu / God's Gift
A mute foundling is raised in an African village by a weaver and his family. The mute regains his powers of speech only after a shock, then reveals his origins and reasons for dumbness. Call Number: PN 1997 .W453 1990z

Woubi cheri
"Woubi Cheri" examines homosexuality in an African city through the lives of several African homosexuals. Call Number: HQ 76.2 .C852 A234 1998

Zan Boko
Zan boko means "the place where the placenta is buried" and symbolizes the continuity between past and present in African village societies. The film tells the story of one village swallowed up by one of Africa's large cities and the change from agrarian society to a mass media culture. Call Number: HT 148 .W4 Z36 1988