Worth a closer look: A comparative study of Xala and Osuofia in London

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, films produced in Africa have been categorized as either ‘elitist’ auteur cinema or ‘popular’ video films. This antagonism is not least due to a tendency to overload the study of African film with theory and thereby to lose sight of the movies themselves. As the same concepts and authors are cited repeatedly, we read a lot of self-references instead of references to the films themselves. In an attempt to bridge the emerging gap between these two types of film, the article proposes a closer look at Ousmane Sembène’s satire Xala from 1974 and the successful two-part video comedy Osuofia in London by Kingsley Ogoro from 2003/2004. The films have little in common in terms of production and reception contexts, but a comparison of the auteur film and the video film may reveal similarities in theme and mise-en-scène.