Global Cinema
List activity
23 views
• 0 this weekCreate a new list
List your movie, TV & celebrity picks.
19 titles
- DirectorClaire DenisStarsIsaach De BankoléGiulia BoschiFrançois CluzetA French woman returns to her childhood home in Cameroon - formerly a colonial outpost - where she's flooded by memories, particularly of Protée, her servant.
- DirectorCharles BartonStarsBud AbbottLou CostelloClyde BeattyTwo booksellers search for diamonds in Africa, along the way meeting a visually-impaired gunner, a hungry lion, and a tribe of cannibals.
- DirectorJean RouchStarsOumarou GandaGambiPetit Touré"I, a Negro" depicts young Nigerien immigrants who left their country to find work in the Ivory Coast, in the Treichville quarter of Abidjan, the capital. These immigrants live in squalor in Treichville, envious of the bordering quarters of The Plateau (the business and industrial district) and the old African quarter of Adjame. The film traces a week in these immigrants' lives, blurring the line between their characters' routines and their own. Every morning, Tarzan, Eddy Constantine and Edward G. Robinson seek work in Treichville in hopes of getting the 20 francs that a bowl of soup costs them. They perform menial jobs as dockers carrying sacks and handy labor shipping supplies to Europe. At night, they drink away their sorrows in bars while dreaming about their idealized lives as their "movie" alter-egos, alternatively as an FBI Agent, a womanizing bachelor, a successful boxer, and even able to stand up to the white colonialists that seduce away their women. These dream-like sequences are shot in a poetic mode. Each day is introduced by an interstitial voice of god omniscient narration from Jean Rouch, providing a universal thematic distance to the movie's events. The film is book-ended by a narration directed at both Petit Jules and the audience from Edward G. Robinson fondly looking back on his childhood in Niger and concluding that his life is worthy of his dreams.
- DirectorOusmane SembeneStarsMbissine Thérèse DiopAnne-Marie JelinekRobert FontaineA black girl from Senegal becomes a servant in France.
- DirectorOusmane SembeneStarsThierno LeyeMyriam NiangSeune SambA corrupt politician is cursed with impotence on the night of his third wedding after embezzling 100 tons of rice.
- DirectorSouleymane CisséStarsIssiaka KaneAoua SangareNiamanto SanogoA young man with magical powers journeys to his uncle to request help in fighting his sorcerer father.
- DirectorDani KouyatéStarsSeydou BoroHamed DickoAbdoulaye KomboudriA storyteller named Djeliba comes to the town of a young boy named Mabo with promises that he will reveal the origin of the boy's ancestry.
- DirectorDjibril Diop MambétyStarsMagaye NiangMyriam NiangChristoph ColombMory, a cowherd, and Anta, a university student, try to make money in order to go to Paris and leave their boring past behind.
- DirectorDjibril Diop MambétyStarsMansour DioufAmi DiakhateMamadou Mahourédia GueyeDramaan is the most popular man in Colobane, but when a woman from his past, now exorbitantly wealthy, returns to the town, things begin to change.
- DirectorAbderrahmane SissakoStarsAïssa MaïgaTiécoura TraoréMaimouna Hélène DiarraBamako. Melé is a bar singer, her husband Chaka is out of work and the couple is on the verge of breaking up... In the courtyard of the house they share with other families, a trial court has been set up. African civil society spokesmen have taken proceedings against the World Bank and the IMF whom they blame for Africa's woes... Amidst the pleas and the testimonies, life goes on in the courtyard. Chaka does not seem to be concerned by this novel Africa's desire to fight for its rights...
- DirectorJean-Pierre BekoloStarsAdèle AdoDorylia CalmelEmile Abossolo M'boIn Jean-Pierre Bekolo's barbed political satire, an infectious hybrid of horror and science fiction, vampiric femmes fatales emasculate high-ranking Cameroonian officials through ancient rituals of Mevoungou.
- DirectorDjo MungaStarsPatsha BayManie MaloneDiplome AmekindraRiva returns to his home town of Kinshasa to sell fuel, however the people whom he stole it from are close behind and when Riva tries to get with a girl her crime boss boyfriend isn't too happy about this.
- DirectorTunde KelaniStarsOjuolape AbayomiUche Ama AbrielMotunrayo AdeoyeThunderbolt: Magun centers around the life of a young, married woman who is struck with an unorthodox African illness and has to find a cure before it claims her life.
- DirectorBen AddelmanSamir MallalStarsOsita IhemeChinedu IkediezeLancelot Oduwa ImasuenNigeria's film industry, Nollywood, is the third-largest in the world--an unstoppable economic and cultural force that has taken the continent by storm and is now bursting beyond the borders of Africa. "Nollywood Babylon" is a feature documentary detailing the industry's phenomenal success. Propelled by a booming 1970s soundtrack of African underground music, the movie presents an electric vision of a modern African metropolis and a revealing look at the powerhouse that is Nigerian cinema.
- DirectorJamie MeltzerStarsIzu OjukwuChico EjiroDon Pedro ObasekiThe Nigerian film industry, known as Nollywood, has exploded in the last ten years. Now the most popular cinema in all of west Africa--even more popular than imports of Hollywood or Bollywood films--the Nigerian film industry has distinguished itself by shooting all films (called video films) on digital video. This has allowed production schedules to be compressed (films are shot in several days) and immediately brought to market (distribution consists of bringing films to Idumota electronics market in Lagos and selling them for home viewing). The sheer volume of Nigerian video films is staggering: one estimate has a film being produced for each day of the year. Nollywood is now the third-largest film industry in the world, generating US$286 million a year for the Nigerian economy. And yet this vibrant, profitable industry is virtually unknown outside of Africa. Jamie Meltzer, director of "Off the Charts: The Song Poem Story," which premiered on PBS' prestigious Independent Lens series has created a fascinating look into this newly emerging film industry, exploring its peculiar inner workings, economic challenges, and diverse array of colorful films. Traveling to the country's chaotic capitol, Lagos, Meltzer spent six weeks following three of Nigeria's hottest directors, each different in personality and style, as they shot their films about love, betrayal, war, and the supernatural. "Welcome to Nollywood" tells the stories of these three directors and their latest productions, while also using interviews with scholars, actors, and journalists who celebrate the industry in insightful and often humorous ways, the Nigerian video-film industry as a whole, its unique character and genres, as well as its impact on the culture of west Africa and Africans at home and abroad.
- DirectorKingsley OgoroStarsNkem OwohMara AshtonFrancis Odega'Osuofia in London' offers a variation on an old story: a country bumpkin comes to town, where city slickers try -- and ultimately fail -- to take advantage of him and steal his money. Osuofia lives in a village in south-eastern Nigeria where he talks a lot and drinks a lot of palm wine. His main occupation is as a hunter, at which he is spectacularly unsuccessful. He is hounded by his creditors, and henpecked by his massive wife and five grown-up daughters. Then one day a lawyer's letter arrives to tell him that a long-forgotten brother has died in Britain, leaving him all his money. Osuofia has to go to London to claim his inheritance. This allows the director to have a lot of fun as Osuofia comes face to face with modern plumbing, a full English breakfast, a butler called Jeeves and a park full of pigeons, which finally arouse his hunter's instincts. Meanwhile the crooked lawyer and his glamorous accomplice Samantha (a flame-haired temptress with a disconcerting resemblance to the young Rebecca Brooks) are working to get him to sign away his inheritance. But the thieves fall out and Osuofia makes it back to Nigeria with his fortune intact -- but accompanied by the predatory Samantha, her eyes still firmly on his chequebook. All of which sets things up nicely for a sequel, as Samantha battles with the challenges of life in an African village, and the implacable hostility of the the first Mrs Osuofia.
- DirectorLionel RogosinStarsZacharia MgabiVinah BendileMiriam MakebaCome Back, Africa chronicles the life of Zachariah, a black South African living under the rule of the harsh apartheid government in 1959.
- DirectorOliver SchmitzStarsThomas MogotlaneMarcel van HeerdenThembi MtshaliMapantsula tells the story of Panic, a petty gangster who inevitably becomes caught up in the growing anti-apartheid struggle and has to choose between individual gain and a united stand against the system.
- DirectorNeill BlomkampStarsSharlto CopleyDavid JamesJason CopeViolence ensues after an extraterrestrial race forced to live in slum-like conditions on Earth finds a kindred spirit in a government agent exposed to their biotechnology.