Journal of African Cinemas - Online First

This research examines the practice of filmmaking from the site of a wheelchair and reflects on making films with a recurring set of limitations that is also an impetus for freedom and creative engagement. An imagined conversation with experimental filmmaker, Jonas Mekas, provides a platform for considering the notion of creative practice research, while simultaneously reflecting on the methodology used to make films.

This article analyses the particularities of Sarah Maldoror’s gaze, founded upon a singular notion of political cinema that used the poetic image of a surrealist matrix. In the Portuguese-speaking world, Maldoror stood out from other engagé¹ filmmakers for being the first to use fiction to portray the fight for African independence. Later films shot in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau portray the involvement of people in the decolonization, without failing to unabashedly point out the cultural hybridity. Her work (dis)orders itself as a ‘filmography of survival’ – which includes both personal projects and commissions accepted to make a living in cinema, in her insubordinate and politicized way. Making use of poetry, jazz and painting, she relied upon a surrealist aesthetic and never conceded to the pressures exerted on her filmmaking, all the while putting together a body of work portraying decolonization and survival. I propose that the invisibility of Maldoror’s filmography resulted from the difficult balance between her creative choices and the coercion she was subjected to.

Review of: Die Kwiksilwers (The Quicksilvers), Jordy Sank (dir.) (2024), South Africa: Sanktuary Films

Although critics have analysed in the past Ousmane Sembène’s use of music in his films, they have rarely looked at music itself as a source of inspiration for the themes he treats in his film. This commentary presents Afro-Cuban music, often called ‘Musique typique’, as an important catalyst in Sembène’s first steps into filmmaking by tracing the narrative motifs of Borom Sarret(The Wagoner) back to songs by two famous Latin American and Afro-Cuban singers, Atahualpa Yupanqui and Guillermo Portabales.

Bongo Movies are celebrated as a phenomenon that could only emerge, thanks to the coincidence of the technical video revolution on the one hand and the economic and political liberation following the era of structural adjustment in Tanzania on the other hand. This article provides an alternative reading of the emergence of Bongo Movies as also rooted in the legacy of earlier post-independent Tanzanian film cultures, including the realms of filmmaking and reception and encompassing positive reference as well as demarcations. While the attempt to grasp Bongo Movies as an emerging grassroots initiative has helped situate them in a political–economical sphere of production, consumption and policing or as a social ground for negotiating contemporary questions of identity and agency, this article attempts to add a historical perspective and contextualize them with the national specifics of Tanzanian cultural production since independence and recurrent themes of audio-visual representation. This article takes films concerned with ‘untangible realities’ as an example of themes that re-emerged throughout the decades by looking at certain works and scenes of recent films in more detail and reading them before the background of earlier representations. It looks at how urbanity, spirituality and relationships are tackled with new foci and sets of aesthetic and narrative styles. In addition, it traces legacies and ruptures in production conditions and decisions that were subject, throughout the decades, to precarious economic conditions, leading to a continuous compromise between economic dependence and creative freedom. In this regard, the emergence of Bongo Movies can be seen as a new way to circumvent the dependence on foreign influence in the creative sector. Implied in this article’s discussion is the distinction of national cinemas and notions of world cinema. The specific Tanzanian attempt to not let these external attributions confine filmmakers’ self-images and agencies find expression in the notion of Bongo Movie as a strategic term of demarcation against limiting attributions.

African films are often influenced by folklore and other cultural elements, including mythology, which is classified as a discrete historical and national storytelling pattern. Kunle Afolayan’s film Citation (2020) is one such film, embodying the supernatural, natural, spiritual and physical representations of Yorùbá folklorist mythology. This article examines the metaphor of the mythical figure, Mợremí Àjàṣorò, in this film, using the semiotic theory. It correlates the heroics of a mythical-cum-historical, legendary figure, Mợremí Àjàṣorò, with that of a fictional character, Mợremí Olùwá in this film, aiming to demonstrate the overlapping semblance between both. The study adopts qualitative research using the tool of content analysis to situate the metaphor apropos to the filmic text to establish the symbols of the Mợremí myth and unearth their signification in the film from the Yorùbá world-view.

Female characters in African crime films play diverse roles, influencing the progression of the stories and diegetic situations. This is particularly significant in African crime films, where male characters have dominated leading roles. Through the analysis of Kemi Adetiba’s King of Boys (2018) and Victor Gatonye’s 40 Sticks (2020), this article discusses the leading female characters’ embodiment of agency of gendered power in the context of crime genre lawlessness as a useful metaphor for representing women leadership and motherhood. The inferences drawn from observation of the films, interspersed with secondary data sourced from books, journals, online articles and behind-the-scenes documentaries, inform the discussions on female characters’ depiction in the sampled films as material to a critique of gendered antagonisms as microcosms of women within African societies.