Forget CGI. Africa has the real thing: breathtaking landscapes, magnetic faces, and vibes that make every film feel like a glimpse into history.

Normal

A love story that dares to take on the forces of nature and shots of incredible beauty that shock with their visual power. Senegalese filmmaker Ramata-Tulaye Si's film was selected for the Cannes Competition, an exceptional and rare honour for a directorial debut.

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In a remote village in northern Senegal, a young married couple are living their love life. Yet their perfect love is on a collision course with the customs of their community, especially during a prolonged drought that stirs up jealousies, disputes and superstitions.

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Official Selection - International Competition | Cannes Film Festival | 2023

Banel & Adama

The greatest love stories have yet to be told. An elderly woman embarks on a long journey and thus unleashes a grand, tender, peculiar, unique second part in a film for which just one time is not enough.

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A woman spends her retirement years taking care of the people around her. Most of all, she's troubled by her lonely neighbor, an eccentric 80-year-old who believes her maid is using voodoo on her. The old woman wants to meet a man from her past, so the retiree and the maid join forces to help her find him. The man has a story to tell. A story that unfolded 50 years ago, before the Portuguese colonial war, and begins as follows: "He had a farm in Africa, at the base of mount Tabu..."

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Alfred Bauer Award | Berlin International Film Festival | 2012
FIPRESCI Prize | Berlin International Film Festival | 2012
Audience Award | Las Palmas Film Festival | 2012

Tabu

In one of the most unexpected arthouse successes in recent years in Greece, Maryam Touzani crafts a finely detailed portrait of love, faith, and identity. A film about silence that speaks louder than words.

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In a small tailoring workshop in the heart of the old Medina, a craftsman who makes traditional kaftans lives with his gravely ill wife in a marriage built on tenderness and quiet understanding. When a young apprentice enters the shop, the gentleness of duty comes into conflict with the truth of desire.

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FIPRESCI Prize - Un Certain Regard | Cannes Film Festival | 2022
Audience Award | Athens International Film Festival | 2022
Best Director | Chicago International Film Festival | 2022

The Blue Caftan

The great Claire Denis's first feature film remains the best cinematic capture of the vastness and warmth of the African continent, reflected through the end of colonialism and the fragmentation of memory.

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A French woman returns to her ancestral home in Cameroon, the first colonial plantation, and there she remembers her childhood, with an emphasis on her unexpected relationship with a black servant.

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Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 1988

Chocolate

Valuable both cinematically and culturally, the Film Foundation's restored print of this landmark African cinema film is a must-watch, a haunting yet liberatingly decolonized look at the oppression of black people.

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Diouana is a young Senegalese woman living in a poor village near Dakar hoping to find a job. Soon, she starts working for a French family who suggests she join them in Antibes to look after their children. But Diouana soon realizes that her boss has brought her only to serve them, without any respite.

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Best French Film | Jean Vigo Prize | 1966