Africa’s New Cinema

The title sequence of Mosotho filmmaker, Lemohang Mosese’s ‘Mother I am Suffocating this is my last film about you, describes it not as a film, but as a lament. With images awash in dolorous monochrome, the film delivers on its promise of taking the viewer through the experience of ‘an artist in lamentation’. A lone figure played by Thato Khobotle, hauls an oversized cross through the inner alleys of Maseru’s crowded streets. Her clothes are tattered and sweat covers her body. Meanwhile, a voice over, crackling through radio-like static for the duration of the film, presents a character now based in Germany, a stand in for the director, divorced from her homeland and admonishing her mother, taken in this instance to be Lesotho. If the medium of film can be a dirge that voices out an age-old ache of a former British ‘protectorate’ like Lesotho, or at least, Lesotho seen through Lemohang’s gaze, it succeeds on all levels. The film is accompanied by a funereal organ-based musical score in a way similar to how the famed film directors Andrei Tarkovsky and Carl Theodor Dreyer suffuse their images with a sepia-toned melancholy conjured by classical music and the slow pace of a funeral procession. At one point in the film, a pastor beats a dusty bible as he preaches while another major character, a trans angel fairy played by Napo Kalebe pulls her middle finger up to the sky, insulting God.

Since gaining her independence, Lesotho has not been exempt from the usual perception of a third-world country as an entity riddled with corruption, coups, and other forms of political strife. This is a perception however, rooted in a grim reality, with high unemployment rates, and a history where political dissidence is met with actual violence from the ruling party. This bodes an even grimmer reality for cinema. Lesotho's poor economic status means that no funding can be available for the arts or arts programmes, which makes feature films like Mother I am Suffocating, this is my last film about you, not only hard to make, but near impossible. As of writing this article, Lesotho still has no cinemas. This makes the film’s existence seem even more miraculous—released in 2019,  it was a result of the filmmakers’ birthing it without any funding save for post-production grants and support from the Doha Film Institute.  Although Lesotho, currently, has no shortage of independent filmmakers who wield cameras without any form of funding except for what is already in their pockets, it is what the film achieves both in an artistic sense, and in the broader context of world cinema, that makes it a noteworthy event in Lesotho’s cinematic landscape.

Pulling from an already established cinematic grammar from other countries, like the slow cinema of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky or Denmark’s Carl Dreyer’s ability to connect his films to larger questions around the precarity of man’s soul and its relationship with an unseen ‘Creator’, it synthesizes the tools of cinema to establish a new language for cinema in Lesotho, and possibly, one that suggests where else it could go. In it, documentary is blended with fiction. The plot of the film is held together by a loose collection of images, withered hands, a boy putting on Virtual Reality glasses to perform a sexual act against a child, men fighting over a sheep’s carcass—favouring moods and impressions over any form of traditional plot. This is cinema as revolt, eschewing traditional, and Western, plot structures to craft a new imagining of what Lesotho cinema might look like, or even African cinema as a whole.  Why, then, five years after its release, and the subsequent release of the director’s follow up efforts, This Is Not A Burial it’s a Resurrection, and the recent Ancestral Vision of The Future, films that have fared excellently on the international stage, does Lesotho, politically and artistically, still find itself in the same place that birthed the film’s lamentations?

The phenomenon of formally sophisticated cinematic works that gain international recognition, despite being made in conditions where funding in their own countries is scarce, or political and economic instability make it near impossible for artists to make a living out of their art, is not exactly new. Ousmane Sembène of Senegal, often called the ‘Father of African Film’, in 1966 released his debut feature film, La Noire de…. (Black Girl), an equally sophisticated film that earned him international recognition. Angry, daring, and fluid in a narrative structure that effortlessly switches between the past and present, it presents a scathing critique of colonialism through the story of a Senegalese woman hoodwinked into working as a housekeeper for a white family in France. A few years later, Senegal again produced a filmmaker who was propelled to international recognition in the shape of Djibril Mambéty, who with just two feature films in his career, pushed formal boundaries with films that borrowed from the French New Wave and African oral traditions to craft a cinema that, like Mother I Am suffocating, is non-linear and eclectic. As far as African film industries go, from as far back as 1960 an artistically rich foundation has been laid by such figures, with the likes of Sarah Maldoror, whose Sambizanga was the first feature film produced in Angola, and made her the first woman to make a feature film in Africa, Senegal’s Safi Faye whose Wolof feature film Mosanne was awarded the Un Certain Regard prize at the Cannes Film Festival. This was a foundation bold and unique in its vision and re-imagining of what cinema could look like, free from the Western conception of cinema, and scathing in its portrayal of Western imperialism and colonial subjugation on the African continent.  The current paucity of robust funding mechanisms for a films, then, is ironic, creating an ecosystem where artists with a singular vision often rely on outside, and commonly, European funding to let their artistic visions truly take flight.

In 2018, I started attending First Thursdays at Atlas Studios in Auckland Park, Johannesburg. It was a monthly, and free event organised by the filmmaker Akin Omotoso and other associates, meant to celebrate and showcase under-seen and challenging work, mainly, from Africa. True to the spirit of an all-encompassing, and democratic curator-ship of films, student work was also shown there at times. It was there where I discovered Ghanaian musician and artist, Blitz Bazawule’s The Burial of Kojo. Told in a fable-like magical realist style, it tells the story of Kojo, who, left to die in an abandoned gold mine, has his daughter travel through a spirit land to save him. With a structure that holds plot loosely, favouring instead visually striking images, sequences, and tone, it achieves an effect similar to poetry, boldly challenging the linearity in plot that characterises so many Hollywood films. The film, too, launched its filmmaker to international recognition, who, after seeing it, Beyoncé enlisted his help to helm her 2020 visual musical odyssey, Black Is King. Blitz went on to direct the even more high-powered and high-profile The Colour Purple remake. Notably, The Burial of Kojo,  too was made with a micro-budget, with early pre- production days having the director using his already established name in the music world to start a Kickstarter to fund the project, by enlisting the help of his supporters.

On one hand, the fact that these artists are creating bold work that manages to propel African art onto international stages, with limited resources, is a story of resilience and the power of film to imagine itself into being, even amidst the most scant resources.

On the other hand, this is also Africa’s, specifically, African governments’ and funding bodies’ overlooking of their own rich cinematic potential to build a film ecosystem that can help re-write the story of Africa as it exists in the collective world imagination.

In 2023, the film journalist and co-founder of film publication, In Nollywood, Anita Eboigbe posted on the social media platform X, ‘A very shady thing is happening with the Mami Wata showtimes, and I’m usually calm, but not this time….there is only one screen showing the movie in the whole of Abuja. We got there this evening, and they said there are technical issues, so they can’t show it’. C.J Obasi’s Mami Wata, released in 2023, tells the story of two sisters who attempt to sew harmony back into their torn village. One part of the village is pulled by the allure of ‘progress’, enlisting a new leader who will move them away from the old leader’s systems, an intermediary who constantly enlists the water goddess’ Mami Wata’s, help in everything pertaining to the village’s affairs. What is interesting about Mami Wata is that it takes the grand melodrama found in Nollywood films, and fuses it with art-house sensibilities found in such films as Japanese Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff; cinema that uses the raw elements of village life and the elements around it; land, air, water, thatch, foliage, to craft an African folktale that aspires to poetic cinema that makes use of the best qualities of the medium, the raw immediacy of sound and image. In 2023, Aljazeera published a feature by the writer Torinmo Salau, titled, ‘Feted abroad, ignored in Nigeria: The story of Mami Wata’s Voyage to the Oscars’.

The article echoed sentiments expressed by Anita, and a slew of other cinema goers who found difficulty in seeing Mami Wata in Nigerian cinemas. Not only was it Nigeria’s Oscar submission for that year, but it too, fared well on the international festival circuit, winning the filmmakers Special Jury Prize for Cinematography at the Sundance Film Festival. In Nigeria, however, Mami Wata’s journey has been rockier. Numerous articles and cinema goers alleged sabotage on the part of Nigerian cinemas, and specifically, film distributor, FilmOne Entertainment, in sabotaging Mami Wata’s screenings in Nigeria. If it wasn’t technical difficulties that prevented people from seeing the film, it was very short runs at the cinemas themselves, often at odd hours, like in the morning, that would ensure that very limited people see the film. FilmOne has since commented that it was purely a marketing issue, that the filmmakers and producers behind Mami Wata should have spent more money on marketing the film. People willing to see Mami Wata were of the contrary, pointing out that FilmOne usually goes ‘all out’ in distributing Nigerian films, ones that are not ‘arthouse’, and align themselves to ‘financially lucrative genres’. Comedy for example, was cited as a genre that does particularly well in Nigeria. Ironically, too, Mami Wata, a film told in Pidgin, exists in a cinema ecosystem where many of the African films being funded, and distributed widely, by African bodies, are either in English, or follow closely the plot structures, and one can argue, the feel and tone of whatever new Hollywood blockbuster is leading the cultural conversation. This is not only a vaudevillian, big-budget entrance into the circus of neo-colonialism, but the African filmmaker’s wilful attempt to put on clothes that don’t quite fit them. The chasm here persists; where often, films that deviate from that norm, not only through the use of language, but also in riskier, and more eclectic cinematic form, seem to be welcomed more and given funding outside of Africa instead. The presence of Netflix and Netflix funded films in Africa has heightened this phenomenon; films that, put side-by-side with Hollywood films with conventional three act structures and genre-faithfulness as defined by screenwriting ‘gurus’, on close inspection, hold very little difference. They are talked about and publicised very highly and with big budgets in the few weeks of their releases, and seemingly, never again after that. This has led to a trend where filmmakers with very little resources, make singular, bold, and enduring work, what is often seen as art-house or personal films, that receive push-back or are overlooked in the countries of their birth, and instead, are championed outside of the continent, either through funding to the filmmakers to make more ‘arthouse’ work, opportunities to direct big budget films as with Blitz Bazawule,  or championing in publications and awards like Sundance.

What is clear is that the film ecosystem in Africa needs re-thinking. It shouldn’t be that generation-defining artists have to go overseas in order to make bold work that stands the test of time. In a scene in Ousmane Sembène’s La Noir De….as the protagonist serves the homeowners she works for lunch with their friends, one of them, without her consent, kisses her on the cheek and says, “I have never kissed a black girl before!” As much as Western funding has helped champion bold and artistically adventurous films, it’s hard to separate the ‘push-and-pull’ of this relationship from a colonial, imperialist, and racist legacy. The ‘other’, a strange magical being from an African ‘wasteland’, is rewarded for performing ‘otherness’ itself. The other, like Ousmane’s protagonist, is kissed on the cheek by western funders simply, for being, well, black….a shiny new object for dancing in the Western imagination’s perception of Africa. Something is being lost in translation.

Despite all this, African filmmakers have miraculously continued to speak a new language of cinema, one that with Africa’s rich cinematic history taken into context, is not new at all. With films like musician turned filmmaker Baloji’s tri-protagonist, and structurally adventurous Augure also being received well on the international festival circuit, Lemohang Mosese’s Ancestral Visions of The Future, Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming A Guinea Fowl and her under-seen and under-appreciated previous film, I Am Not A Witch, Fradique’s Air Conditioner,  Arie and Chuko Esiri’s Eyimofe, or Akinola Davies Jr.’s Cannes hit My Father’s Shadow, it seems a language for cinema that draws from African oral storytelling, music, and uniquely African images is still furiously resilient. It just needs Africa herself to be its biggest champion and advocate. Recently, Baloji himself expressed disappointment at Augure being censored in Cameroon for promoting ‘LGBTQ+ culture.’ With the spate of anti-LGBTQ laws on the African continent, as well as the announcements of funding from Africa meant to revive African film industries, the imagining, and imaging of a film ecosystem cannot happen without a full appreciation of what makes cinema wonderful in the first place. It is not only a place where we can experience other realities entirely different from our own, but also, a place where we can re-imagine ourselves, this continent, and where we would like it to go. This cannot happen if cinema itself doesn’t challenge our perceptions, not only socially but also in terms of story itself, of what is seen as ‘normal’. If anything can be taken from Lemohang  Mosese’s Mother I Am Suffocating This Is My last film about you….is that Africa has not been a good mother to her children. We flee from her, we admonish her, we love her. She suffocates us. But we also learn from her. Either through stories she tells to us herself, or how we change and interpret those stories to apply them to the unique highs and lows of our lives.