From Nollywood to New Nollywood: the story of Nigeria’s runaway success

From stories about cult and witchcraft to heartbreak and sorrow, Nigeria's Nollywood has developed into Africa's giant in filmmaking

Women in African Cinema : An aesthetic and thematic analysis of filmmaking by women in Francophone West Africa and Lusophone and Anglophone Southern Africa

This study focuses on the role of women in African cinema – in terms of female directors working in the African film industries as well as the representation of women in African film. My research specifically focuses on francophone West African and lusophone and anglophone Southern African cinemas (in particular post-apartheid South African cinema). This research is necessary and significant because African women are underrepresented in theoretical work as well as in the practice of African cinema. The small corpus of existing theoretical and critical studies on the work of female African filmmakers clearly shows that African women succeed in producing films against tremendous odds. The emergence of female directors in Africa is an important but neglected trend which requires more dedicated research. The pioneering research of African-American film scholar Beti Ellerson is exemplary in this regard, as she has, since the early 2000s, initiated a new field of academic study entitled African Women Cinema Studies. My own research is situated within this emerging field and aims to make a contribution to it. The absence of women in public societal spheres is often regarded as an indicator of areas where societies need to change. In the same sense the socio-political and cultural advancements of women are indicators of how societies have progressed towards improved living conditions for all. Because the African woman can be viewed as doubly oppressed, firstly by Black patriarchal culture and secondly by Western colonising forces, it is essential that the liberation of African women includes an opportunity for women to verbalise and demonstrate their own vision of women’s roles for the future. The study analyses a large corpus of films through exploring notions of nationalism and post/neo-colonialism in African societies; issues related to the female body such as health, beauty and sexuality; female identity, emancipation and African feminism in the past and present; the significance of traditional cultural practices versus the consequences and effects of modernity; and the interplay between the individual and the community in urban as well as rural African societies. Female filmmakers in Africa are increasingly claiming the right to represent these issues in their own ways and to tell their own stories. The methods they choose to do this and the products of their labours are the focus of this study. Ultimately, the study attempts to formulate more complex models for the analysis of African women’s filmmaking practices, in tracing the plurality of a female aesthetics and the multiplicity of thematic approaches in African women’s filmmaking

The future is digital: an introduction to African digital arts

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African cyborgs: females and feminists in African science fiction film

African feminist writers argue black female bodies should be understood as interactions between materiality and the symbolic constructions of the body embedded within a given culture. They caution that an overemphasis on corporeality and embodiment denies subjectivity to black women. Responding to such concerns, contemporary African cultural and creative practitioners offer alternatives to continuing objectification and bodily stereotyping. In this essay I am particularly interested in the alternative visions of black female bodies presented in African speculative and science fiction film – visions which, I argue, engage colonial histories and local traditions in order to imagine a future inclusive of empowered female protagonists. I explore how the fictional configurations and cyborg imaginations of African sci-fi deconstruct and subvert the fixity, corporeality, fragility and captivity of the black female body. Drawing on African feminism and feminist science fiction in particular, I attempt to construct a theoretical framework through which to approach the representation of female bodies in sci-fi film from Africa. In the work of filmmakers such as Cameroonian Jean-Pierre Bekolo (Les Saignantes, 2005 and Naked Reality, 2016), Ghanaian filmmaker Frances Bodomo (Afronauts, 2014), Kenyan director Wanuri Kahiu (Pumzi, 2009) and South African filmmakers Michael Matthew (Sweetheart, 2010) and Amy van Houten (Elf, 2015), we find female-centred fantastical narratives that recast African women as futuristic cyborgs. Reminiscent of Donna Haraway's cyborg feminism of the late twentieth century, these filmmakers adapt the genres of fantasy and sci-fi to speculate about alternative African pasts and futures

Into the archives: critiquing White feminism through the work of Katinka Heyns

In chapter 10 Lizelle Bisschoff looks at South African filmmaker Katinka Heyns (b. 1947) and uses it as a vehicle to both describe the history of Afrikaans women filmmakers but also to critique the roles of White women in the country’s film industry. A focus on the role of women reveals the silences and absences left by the apartheid system that ravaged the country for the best part of the last century: the voices of Black South Africans are rare, and those of Black women virtually absent. With a study of Die Storie van Klara Viljee (The Story of Klara Viljee, 1991), the author here inscribes South Africa’s complex and contentious socio-political history with gendered and racial consideration. Heyns’ oeuvre, considered from a feminist perspective, prompts us to recognise White feminism, and the place of race in genderpolitics and debates

Editorial introduction

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Maia Lekow and Christopher King, directors. The Letter. 2019. 81 min. English and Swahili, with English subtitles. Filmed and produced in Kenya. BFI Player. No price reported.

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Editorial: decolonising film education

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Introduction: Revising the Classics: Opening up the archives of African cinema

First paragraph: The long journey that has led to the present volume began almost a decade ago when we started planning for the inaugural Africa in Motion (AiM) Film Festival (www.africa-inmotion.org.uk), at the Filmhouse in Edinburgh, which took place in October 2006. The complete programme for the festival consisted of 25 films from all over Africa (shorts, documentaries and feature films from the 1950s to the 2000s), and was designed to give audiences a sense of the aesthetic diversity and richness of filmmaking across the African continent. However, if part of our motivation stemmed from a desire to reveal the geographical range of African cinema, we were also particularly anxious to provide greater historical depth to our audience’s understanding of film in Africa, and it was with this aim that we embarked on a research project—generously funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council—which allowed us to curate a series of ‘Lost African Classics’ as part of the first AiM. The primary aim of the project was to bring little-known films—by both major and neglected African directors—to the attention of theorists and critics, as well as to the general viewing public. At the time, very few African films were screened to the general public in the UK; statistics obtained in 2005 from the now defunct UK Film Council showed that only nine African films were theatrically released in the UK between 1995 and 2005. African films could only be seen in the UK in niche film festivals or occasionally in international film festivals or in special retrospectives in independent art house cinemas. The four ‘lost classics’ screened at Africa in Motion 2006 focused on Francophone West African filmmaking from the 1960s, which a general critical consensus (at that time finally beginning to crack) had long held to be the place and time at which something called ‘African cinema’ was born. The films screened were: Le Retour d’un aventurier/The Return of an Adventurer (Mustapha Alassane, Niger/France, 1966); Concerto pour un exil/Concerto for an Exile (Désiré Ecaré, Ivory Coast/France, 1968), Contras’ City (Djibril Diop Mambety, Senegal/France, 1969) and Badou Boy (Djibril Diop Mambety, Senegal/France, 1970). The two screenings of the Lost Classics package during AiM 2006 were well received by audiences and were, as with the rest of the festival, practically sold ou

Katrina Daly Thompson , Zimbabwe's Cinematic Arts: language, power, identity. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press (pb $27 – 978 0 25300 651 6). 2013, 256 pp.

No abstract available