Mory, a cowherd, and Anta, a university student, try to make money in order to go to Paris and leave their boring past behind.

Eager to find a better life abroad, a Senegalese woman becomes a mere governess to a family in southern France, suffering from discrimination and marginalization.

Domingos is a member of an African liberation movement, arrested by the Portuguese secret police, after bloody events in Angola. His wife goes from a prison station to another, trying in vain to find out where he is.

Aboard a giant slave ship in an abandoned Citroën factory, the history of the West Indies is traced through several centuries of French oppression. The ship becomes a stage for the people to tell stories via song and dance—from their enslavement to their displacement in Metropolitan France.

An educated native of Mauritania tries to find work in Paris but encounters difficulty because of his race.

A young man with magical powers journeys to his uncle to request help in fighting his sorcerer father.

A now-rich woman returns to her poor desert hometown to propose a deal to the populace: her fortune, in exchange for the death of the man who years earlier abandoned her and left her with his child.

An archaeologist unearths the mummy of an Egyptian queen. He doesn't realize that his daughter has a strong resemblance to the dead queen, and soon the mummy awakens. Complications ensue.

Arranged to marry a rich man, young Ada is crushed when her true love goes missing at sea during a migration attempt — until a miracle reunites them.

Qinawi, a physically challenged peddler who makes his living selling newspapers in the central Cairo train station, is obsessed with Hanuma, an attractive young woman who sells drinks. While she jokes with him about a possible relationship, she is actually in love with Abu Siri, a strong and respected porter at the station who is struggling to unionize his fellow workers to combat their boss' exploitative and abusive treatment.

A rich businessman in Senegal is cursed with crippling erectile dysfunction upon the day of his marriage to his third wife; the only cure is brutal public humiliation.

A money order from a relative in Paris throws the life of a Senegalese family man out of order. He deals with corruption, greed, problematic family members, the locals and the changing from his traditional way of living to a more modern one.

Caught in the stranglehold of debt and structural adjustment, Africa is fighting for its survival. In the face of disaster, representatives of African society bring an action against international financial institutions. The trial takes place in Bamako, in the yard of a house, among its inhabitants.

A young girl with a physical disability arrives in Dakar and challenges the convention of boys selling newspapers on the street.

The Ceddo people try to preserve their traditional African culture against the onslaught of Islam, Christianity, and the slave trade. When King Demba War sides with the Muslims, the Ceddo kidnap his daughter, Princess Dior Yacine, to protest their forcible conversion to Islam.

Just outside of the Malian city of Timbuktu, now occupied by militant Islamic rebels who impose the Sharia on civilians and inconvenience their daily life, a cattleman kills a fisherman.

A Senegalese platoon of soldiers from the French Free Army are returned from combat in France and held for a temporary time in a military encampment with barbed wire fences and guard towers in the desert. Among their numbers are Sergeant Diatta, the charismatic leader of the troop who was educated in Paris and has a French wife and child, and Pays, a Senegalese soldier left in a state of shock from the war and concentration camps and who can only speak in guttural screams and grunts.

A small African village. The story focuses on Bila, a ten year old boy who befriends an old woman, Sana. Everybody calls her 'Witch' but Bila himself calls her 'Yaaba' (grandmother). When Bila's cousin Nopoko gets sick it is Sana's medicine that saves her.

Set in 1987 against the backdrop of a hunger strike by the Egyptian film industry, Chahine himself steps in to play Yehia, the famed Egyptian director whose life is chronicled in "Alexandria, Why?" and "An Egyptian Story". Obsessed with Amr, the handsome actor he discovered and cast as his alter-ego in parts one and two of The Alexandria Trilogy, Yehia pressures Amr to star in various film projects that change even as Yehia's perception of the young actor begins to change. He first casts Amr as Hamlet, which the actor deems too demanding for his talents, then as the lead in a musical biopic of demigod Alexander the Great, who founded the city of Alexandria in 332 B.C.

The death of a prince brings a young woman back to the palace where she was born into servitude. The lingering legacy is brought into light from behind frosted windows and velvet curtains.

Adam Ousmane is a pool attendant at a local resort. When the new managers decide to downsize, Adam loses his job to his own son, Abdel. Shattered by the turn of events, Adam is pressured into contributing to the Chadian war effort. With no money to speak of, the only asset he can donate is his son.

Amongst the mountains of Lesotho, an 80-year-old widow winds up her affairs and makes arrangements for her burial. But when her village is threatened with resettlement due to the construction of a reservoir, she finds a new will to live and ignites a spirit of resistance within her community.

Thousands of royal artifacts of Dahomey, a West African kingdom, were taken by French colonists in the 19th century for collection and display in Paris. Centuries later, a fraction returned to their home in modern-day Benin. This dramatized documentary follows the journey of 26 of the treasures as told by cultural art historians, embattled university students, and one of the repatriated statues himself.

As World War II rages in Europe, a conflict arises between the French and the Diola-speaking tribe of Africa, prompting the village women to organize their men to sit beneath a tree to pray.

Originally commissioned by the city of Algiers to promote tourism, Mohamed Zinet’s Tahia ya Didou blends documentary with fiction to create a poetic, acerbic and rapturous portrait of the director’s native city. The camera travels freely, through the port, market, streets and cafés, capturing everyday people, some of whom recur frequently enough to seem like protagonists. The nominal plotline follows a French tourist couple’s leisurely visit to the city, the man having previously served in the army during the Algerian war. As they walk around, his comments betray his mindset’s racist colonial prejudices, while his wife reiterates asinine clichés. Their unhurried wandering is interrupted when he comes across a blind man and realises that he tortured him during his army service. The film is punctuated with punchy sequences that show a poet named Momo delivering verse as an elegy for Algiers.

Ngor is a young man living in a Senegalese village who wishes to marry Coumba. Ongoing drought in the village has affected its crop of groundnuts and as a result, Ngor cannot afford the bride price for Coumba. He goes to Senegal's capital city, Dakar, to try to earn more money and is exploited there. He returns to the villagers and shares his experiences of the city with the other men. The story, which shows the daily lives of the villagers, is told in the form of a letter to a friend from a villager, voiced by Faye.

On a photo shoot in Ghana, an American model slips back in time, becomes enslaved on a plantation and bears witness to the agony of her ancestral past.

Léon G. Damas (1912–1978) was the first poet to “live Négritude”, according to the Senegalese poet, politician and cultural theorist Léopold Sédar Senghor. Cosmopolitan and always in transit, his writing is a chorus of melodies and imagery imbued with angst and melancholy and strongly influenced by jazz and blues. Punctuated by images of the landscapes of French Guiana and the voice of the artist, the film exemplifies the poetic documentary form to which Maldoror frequently returned.

Just before the turn of the 21st century, Drahmane returns to his father's village in Sokolo, Mali. A contemplative bike stroll around town makes him reflect on the significance of time passing at the dawn of a new millennium. As everybody goes on with their daily tasks, Sokolo might as well be the center of the world. The film earned Sissako awards at the Fribourg International Film Festival, the Ouagadougou Panafrican Film and Television Festival and the San Francisco International Film Festival.

Before immigrating to the West, Abdallah travels to the coastal city of Nouadhibou, Mauritania, to visit his mother. Although he grew up there, Abdallah feels anything but at home in his old neighborhood: he can no longer speak the local dialect and he wears western clothes that immediately cast him as an outsider. But, as Abdallah spends time with a young boy and an elderly electrician, he can't help but feel a sense of loss for the life he's abandoning.

Chad, 2006. After a forty-year civil war, the radio announces the government has just amnestied the war criminals. Outraged by the news, Gumar Abatcha orders his grandson Atim, a sixteen-year-old youth, to trace the man who killed his father and to execute him. Atim obeys him and, armed with his father's own gun, he goes in search of Nassara, the man who made him an orphan. It does not take long before he finds him. Nassara, who now goes straight, is married, goes to the mosque and owns a small bakery. After some hesitation Atim offers him his services as an apprentice. He is hired then it will be easy for him to gun down the murderer of his father. At least, that is what he thinks...

In 1972, Djibril Diop Mambety shoots "Touki Bouki." Mory and Anta are in love. Two young lovers share the same dream: to leave Dakar for Paris. At the fateful moment, Anta embarks. Mory stays alone on quay, unable to tear himself away from his land. Forty years later, "A Thousand Suns" investigates the personal and universal inheritance which represents "Touki Bouki." What has happened since? Magaye Niang, the hero of the movie, has never left Dakar. And today, the old cowboy wonders where Anta is, the love of his youth. Stories about family, exile and cinema meet between the sphere of intimacy and that of myth.

A spiritual journey into the highlands of Harar, immersed in the rituals of khat, a leaf Sufi Muslims chewed for centuries for religious meditations – and Ethiopia’s most lucrative cash crop today. A tapestry of intimate stories offers a window into the dreams of youth under a repressive regime.

Come Back, Africa chronicles the life of Zachariah, a black South African living under the rule of the harsh apartheid government in 1959.

A cart-taxi driver goes to the city to make a living, but out of sympathy with other poverty-stricken people, he works for free and goes hungry himself.

Mister X is the head of an international smuggling ring in Chicago and arrives in Cairo to practice his activity. The police know about him and begin to watch him. The police exploit the great resemblance between X and the airport employee Zaki, so they exploit him in their mission, and the events follow in a comic form.

A fictional documentary that portrays the city of Dakar, Senegal, as we hear the conversation between a Senegalese man (the director, Djibril Diop Mambéty) and a French woman, Inge Hirschnitz. As we travel through the city in a picturesque horse drawn wagon, we chaotically rush into this and that popular neighborhood of the capital, discovering contrast after contrast: A small African community waiting at the Church's door, Muslims praying on the sidewalk, the Rococo architecture of the Government buildings, the modest stores of the craftsmen near the main market.

Six and Twelve is one of a series of short films and documentaries produced under the auspices of the Centre Cinématographique Marocain in the years after Moroccan independence. While most of these were utilitarian in nature, Bouanani, Tazi, and Rechiche took a different route with this film, creating a modernist “city symphony” film that documented six hours in the life of the city of Casablanca. Combining a hard bebop soundtrack with stunning black and white cinematography and a radical editing style, the film stands as a document to the energetic experimentation of this period of Moroccan art and cinema.

The story of Massaoud, a rebellious young man, oppressed by both his family and the sclerotic society.

Ola Balogun's first feature film was made in France and focuses on a group of young Black intellectuals and artists. At the centre is Alpha, whose scepticism about fixed appellations is also expressed in his own chosen name. In his Parisian garret, the characters debate politics, art and philosophy and negotiate Black identity and cultural heritage. The action continues on its improvised way in the cafés, parks and nightclubs of Paris until Alpha finds himself between the fireworks and the celebrating masses on Bastille Day – in the middle and yet on the margins.

A woman dressed in a robe, hands bound, is being transported through a barroom into a jail cell, directly outside of which later appears a jury box filled with jurors. Linearity is rejected as space is treated poetically, following the coordinates of a propulsive social idea - the social imprisonment of black women.

In Casablanca, a group of filmmakers conduct discussions with people about their expectations of, and aspirations for, the emerging Moroccan national cinema. When a disgruntled worker kills his superior accidentally, their inquest shifts focus, and they begin to probe the motives of the killing.

Ngando and Ndomé share an extremely perfect love. Yet, tradition demands a dowry for Ndomé’s hand that Ngando, an orphan, cannot afford. Forced to ask his uncle for assistance, Ngando finds himself at the mercy of his uncle’s lust and greed. How can Ngando and Ndomé find peace together? Their journey will be challenging and everyone will learn that not everything special can be saved.

In this meditative film the everyday lives of poor Ethiopian peasants are shown using documentary as well as storytelling techniques, with its drama arising out of the timeless yet persistent issues of their lives.

Set in northern Nigeria towards the end of the 19th century, Shaihu Umar begins with a discussion between Islamic students and their renowned teacher, the wise man Shaihu Umar. Asked about his origins, Umar begins to tell his story: he comes from a modest background and is separated from his mother after his father dies and his stepfather is banished. His subsequent trials and tribulations are marked by slavery, and he is put to any number of tests until he finally becomes the adopted son of his Arabic master Abdulkarim. He attends Quranic school and is made an imam upon reaching adulthood. Following a particular dream, he resolves to search for his mother.

Ahmed Bouanani’s first feature film played a pivotal role in bringing experimentalism to Moroccan cinema. It’s a fable-like story of a poor young farmer who finds treasure in a flour bag. This takes him on a journey where nothing is as it seems. The film’s narrative structure frequently makes reference to mythology and literature, utilizing Morocco’s rich history and oral traditions.

A Coca-Cola bottle dropped from an airplane raises havoc among a normally peaceful tribe of African bushmen who believe it to be a utensil of the gods.

The short film Jamal (1981) by Ibrahim Shaddad is a report from the life of a camel, most of which plays out in a dreary, small room – a sesame mill.

After we last see him in "Alexandria, Why?" Egyptian filmmaker Yehia Mourad is in his thirties, and successful in his work, he has grown distant from his wife and children and suffers a symbolic blockage of the heart while shooting the final scenes of his latest film. After being flown to England for evaluation, it's determined that Yehia must undergo emergency surgery. Fact and fiction blend seamlessly—with healthy doses of cleverly absurdist fantasy—as the film explores the various personalities and forces that have made Yehia (and Youssef Chahine) the man he has become.

A documentary produced in super-8 with a mixture of fiction. It caused a stir wherever it was shown, having to be subjected to the censorship in force at the time of the military regime. It poetically addresses the various prejudices and conflicts that involve the field of sexuality. Two men star in love scenes. Testimonials by Lauro Nascimentos, Eleonora Menicucci, João Silvério Trevisan, Henrique Magalhães and popular people about conflicts involving affection between people of the same sex.

A father loses his carpentry workshop after his son-in-law stops paying taxes regularly. His son Hassan, a bus driver, struggles hard to save his father’s workshop, while the daughters try to replace it with a new project inspired by the “Infitah” era.

Two Malian teenagers, Bah and Batrou, from different backgrounds, meet at secondary school. Bah is the descendent of a great tribal chieftain. Batrous father, a provincial military governor, represents the new ruling power. The two teenagers are part of a generation that rejects the established order and challenges the society in which they live.

Filmmaker-griot coming from the theater, it was with a camera, while the war in Vietnam occupied everyone's minds, that Sarah Maldoror gave visibility to the African wars of decolonization: Angola, Guinea Bissau, French Guinea, Cape Verde... Her short film Monangambée addresses the torture by the Portuguese army of a sympathizer of the Angolan resistance. At the end of editing, Sarah Maldoror approached the members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago during a Parisian concert and offered to add sound to her film. The next day they watched the film, were convinced and recorded their first soundtrack for free as evidence of African-American solidarity. Shot in Algiers, Monangambée is a film about torture and, more broadly, about the incomprehension between the colonized and the colonizers. It is based on a novel by the Angolan writer Luandino Vieira, then imprisoned by the Portuguese colonial power.

A petty gangster inevitably becomes involved in the growing anti-apartheid struggle and is forced to choose between individual gain and a united stand against the system.

During a robbery at a petrol station in town, one of the accomplices is shot dead. The other, Samba Traoré, flees with the loot: a suitcase full of banknotes. After years away, he returns to his native village. Life has gone on as usual, and Saratou is as beautiful as he remembers her. Director Idrissa Ouedraogo paints a portrait of a man haunted by his past, trying to rebuild his life and start afresh. But past mistakes never stay buried for long.

Burial of a Christian political activist in a Muslim cemetary forces a conflict imbued with religious fervor.

Sudanese filmmaker Ibrahim Shaddad provides a dramatic and powerful account of the trials and tribulations of a Sudanese villager in a large alien city. Shot entirely without dialogue, the film's innovative use of sound helps tell the story of a shepherd who leaves his wife and herd to settle in a nearby town. Since its premiere at the Alexandria Film Festival, Human Being (إنسان / Insan) has been shown in a number of festivals in the Middle East and Europe. This film is a prime example of experimental Arab cinema.

Waris Hussein’s acclaimed drama is based on the autobiography of Firdaus Kanga, who stars in the lead role of Brit, a young man born with brittle bone disease, which causes him to have never grown beyond four feet tall. The film follows his sexual awakening whilst his family simultaneously disintegrates all around him. An extremely moving drama confronting stereotypes around disability, sexuality and race, featuring a powerhouse performance from Kanga.

Drawn from elements of West African folk tales, it depicts how a newborn boy, Kirikou, saves his village from the evil witch Karaba.

Qabyo 2 is the quintessential example of the sequel being better than the original. Written and directed by, and starring, a legendary cast of multi-hyphenated Somali artists, this cult classic combined unconventional filmmaking techniques, kinetic editing and a fascinating interpretation of mise en scène that’s since become an easily digestible visual grammar for its intended audience. This bombastic socio-comic musical about diaspora and assimilation in America ushered in a new era of national cinema that followed the Somali cinematic tradition’s steadfast belief in the ‘by us, for us’ philosophy.

When a woman shelters a group of girls from suffering female genital mutilation, she starts a conflict that tears her village apart.

The daughter of an Englishman and an Andalusian woman, Juanita rejects the historical changes taking place in Tangier.She lives alone in this "Paradise lost", surrounded by her sister Elena; Esther, her close friend who dedicates her entire life to an impossible love affair with a Moroccan; and Hamruch the housemaid, who disappears one day without saying a word. The Spanish Civil War, WWII with the arrival of refugees from Europe, and the Moroccan independence finally returns the city to its Arab origins. Juanita's tragedy lies in not realizing that her world is destined to disappear by the destructive and rejuvenating force of History.

U-CARMEN is a feature film based on Georges Bizet's 19th-century opera that was filmed on location in a modern South African township setting. The energy, compassion, and heat of township life in all its elements create a constantly visually interesting and dynamic background for the unfolding of the story, which owes part of its huge popularity to the thrilling combination of a violent gangster tale with a passionate, almost supernatural love story. As it unfolds, it explores issues of fame and wealth, the position of a strong and independently minded woman in a very masculine society and, perhaps most importantly, the incomprehensible attraction between abuser and victim. Bizet's opera, based on Prosper Merimée's novel, premiered in Paris on March 3, 1875. Set in a poor area of Seville, the story of the magnetic woman who seduces, loves, and ultimately destroys her lover and herself...

Yacine is in his 30s, of Algerian origins, and has come to Paris looking for inner peace. A playful and poetic quest leads him via all kinds of strange encounters to an increasingly surrealist world and to Andalusia: a state of mind.

The odyssey of Senegalese friends who attempt a life-threatening boat crossing.

A Westernized filmmaker, Issa, is a polygamist whose third wife Mimi is a doctor and high-profile health minister. Accustomed to a certain degree of empowerment and independence from her husband (deciding to stay in her own house instead of moving into his household), Mimi carries on a not-too-subtle affair with the married Abba, a fishmonger who sends her a tell-tale case of fish after each encounter as a token of his affection. Confronted by Issa with his suspicions of infidelity after he finds Abba in the courtyard, Mimi decides to file for divorce, a move that soon brings on a new set of complications, as relatives plead for reconciliation to avoid the shame, Issa's second wife increasingly resents the attention paid to Mimi, and Abba's wife begins to grow suspicious of Mimi's role in her husband's life.

Riva is a small time operator who has just returned to his hometown of Kinshasa, Congo after a decade away with a major score: a fortune in hijacked gasoline. Wads of cash in hand and out for a good time, Riva is soon entranced by beautiful night club denizen Nora, the kept woman of a local gangster.

In Tetouan, at the northern edge of Morocco, three young men decide to rob a jewelry store. The heist goes awry, and their destinies part drastically.

Balthazar is a young African filmmaker on the brink of directing his first project, The Cycle of the Cockroach, a fictional story about a young woman who survived unspeakable atrocities only to find herself committed to the same mental institution as a man driven insane by the crimes he perpetrated during the war. Potential funders for the film insist the themes are too bleak and pessimistic-they encourage Balthazar to make a "message" film that raises awareness about gender-based violence or HIV/AIDS instead. But he refuses to give up. Instead of telling his production team the news, Balthazar continues preparations for the film without financing or equipment. After rehearsing a scene with each of the characters, reality blurs and scenes from the script materialize, provoking the question: Can a film like this exist only in the director's dreams? Armed with a daring and creative visual language...

Satché is about to die. He decides to make his last day on this world the day of his life.

On an Algerian beach, kids splash about, sleep, squabble - and then suddenly go to war. And it’s neither Lord of the Flies nor La Guerre des boutons. In her first film, full of grace, Narimane Mari films this childish freefor- all closely, at the irregular pace of an imagination inspired by the highest form of reality, national History — actually, nothing less than the Algerian War of Independence. When their make-believe induces a general upheaval, we follow the flock of children as they stamp their feet up the stairs, invade houses, cross village squares, in a whirlwind of shouts and empty words. Time is stretched like in a dream, through a choreography of belligerent shadows or the night-time explosion of the cemetery, as so many warning signs of dangers to come.

One day in the life of Soad, who lives with her mother and bed-ridden father on the outskirts of Cairo.

In the fading grandeur of downtown Cairo, Khalid, a 35-year-old filmmaker is struggling to make a film that captures the pulse of his city at a moment when all around him dreams as much as buildings are disintegrating. With the help of his friends who send him footage from their lives in Beirut, Baghdad and Berlin, he finds the strength to keep going through the difficulty and beauty of living IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE CITY.

Young Tunisian Hedi lives an ordered life in which he believes there can be no more surprises. His future will play out as other people have planned, until he meets a young woman named Rim at a hotel in Mahdia Hediand. An ostensibly personal story broadens into a panorama of a society in upheaval, an allegory about breaking away from traditions. And a film about the happiness and pain of freedom.

Ady, a 13 years old boy, no longer listens to his father who raises him alone. The latter, running out of resources, decides to entrust Ady to his uncle Amadou for the summer. Uncle Amadou and his family live on the other side of the Mediterranean sea... in Burkina Faso! There, at 13 years, one must become a man but Ady, persuaded to go on holidays, understands things differently.

" ... Bennani's mother, a real-life pharmacist and pathologist, also plays one here on the CAPS. Her own mother's 80th birthday is the occasion for the titular party, at which she will debut a youthful new look, the product of an extensive rejuvenation procedure ... Shot in the artist's home city of Rabat, Morocco, the 30-minute video channel-surfs between pirate frequencies, surveillance footage, and documentation of the raucous celebration. We spend time with the party’s MC-for-hire as he slurps harira, flips off a trooper, and dispenses a longish musical interlude about a food vendor who once invoked his ire. Eventually, we land on the nightmarish, static-riven eyes and mouth of ZIP, a user interface promising an illicit escape from the CAPS, suggesting we "sign the lease" on a new body in Florida." — Maxwell Paparella (Screen Slate)

Kena and Ziki long for something more. Despite the political rivalry between their families, the girls resist and remain close friends, supporting each other to pursue their dreams in a conservative society. When love blossoms between them, the two girls will be forced to choose between happiness and safety.

A man is trapped in a mine shaft by his vengeful brother while his daughter embarks on a magical journey to rescue him.

A hybrid film set in London by a Rwandan director, exploring a three­way relationship between a mysterious Nigerian man, a British woman and her ex. After his death, Simon appears to the ex as a ghost to tell his story, demanding a presence that was denied him as an asylum seeker. British and European political furor threaten both the director’s film plans and his stay in the UK. The fictional scenes are intercut with scenes of demonstrations.

Filmmakers Ibrahim, Suliman, Eltayeb and Manar, close friends for many years, left their motherland in the sixties and seventies to study film abroad and founded the Sudanese Film Group in 1989. After years of distance and exile, they are reunited, hoping to finally make their old dream come true: to bring back cinema to Sudan by reopening the Halfaia Cinema, a dilapidated theater in Khartoum.

S is a young soldier in the southern desert of Tunisia. When S learns about his mother’s death, he obtains a week’s leave and goes back home. He will never return to the camp. In his popular neighborhood starts a man hunt after which S eventually escapes through the mountain. Few years later, F, a young woman married to a rich business man who has just settled in a luxurious villa, learns of her pregnancy. One morning, she goes out alone for a walk in the forest. She will never come back.

A young man is sent to "La Maca," a prison in the middle of the Ivorian forest ruled by its inmates. As tradition goes with the rising of the red moon, he is designated by the Boss to be the new "Roman" and must tell a story to the other prisoners. Learning what fate awaits him, he begins to narrate the mystical life of the legendary outlaw named "Zama King" and has no choice but to make his story last until dawn.

On an empty road in the middle of the night, Shula stumbles across the body of her uncle. As funeral proceedings begin around them, she and her cousins bring to light the buried secrets of their middle-class Zambian family.

January 29, 2024. Red Crescent volunteers receive an emergency call. A five-year old girl is trapped in a car under fire in Gaza, pleading for rescue. While trying to keep her on the line, they do everything they can to get an ambulance to her. Her name was Hind Rajab.