Alternative Film Guide

World Cinema clips: The video below, posted by landurius on youtube, is from writer-director Ousmane Sembene’s 2004 drama Moolaadé, the story of a woman who, by refusing to accept traditional social mores — in this case, the necessity for female circumcision — must pay the price of being independent-minded.
This particular sequence revolves around a married [...]

AFI FEST 2007 - African Showcase

CLOUDS OVER CONAKRY (IL VA PLEUVOIR SUR CONAKRY) Cast: Alex Ogou, Moussa Keita, Tella Kpomahou DIR: Cheick Fantamady Camara PROD: Annabel Thomas Majama Camera. Guinea, France
FARO – GODDESS OF THE WATERS (FARO – LA REINE DES EAUX) Cast: Sotigui Kouvate, Fili Traore, Michel Mpambara DIR: Salif Traore PROD: [...]

Suffering and Smiling (2006)
Director: Dan Ollman
 

By Rosemary Westwell
The mass suffering of the people of Africa has long been ignored by more affluent governments elsewhere. This neglect is compounded by the fact that much of that affluence has come from plundering the natural resources of the African continent — with little thanks or reimbursement to the [...]

With nine nominations, including Best Film and Best Director (Alejandro González Iñárritu), Babel seems to be the Chicago Film Critics Association’s favorite 2006 flick.
Among the other multiple nominees are The Departed and The Queen, both of which are in the running for Best Film and Best Director (Martin Scorsese and Stephen Frears, respectively).
The two [...]

News on the 50th bfi/London Film Festival, via The [London] Independent:
"Tony Blair described Africa as being a stain on the conscience of the world’s wealthy nations. Chatting the next day over a coffee, [The Last King of Scotland director Kevin] Macdonald agreed that, "for whatever reason, Africa is more and more in people’s minds, because [...]

São Paulo’s Arab Cultural Institute and the Museum of Images and Sound are currently sponsoring the exhibit Mundo Árabe (Arab World), with a screening of seven films from Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Mauritania.
Among the titles are Jillali Farhati’s La Plage des enfants perdus / The Beach of Lost Children (1991, Morocco), the story [...]

I’ve added the list of winners at this year’s Zimbabwe International Film Festival, which came to a close this past Sept. 3.
Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now, the tale of two Palestinian suicide bombers, was chosen the Best Film. The Best Actor award went to Imad Creidi for playing a young Lebanese immigrant in Sweden in [...]

"I don’t know how many people in this room have seen a man being executed at point blank. I did when I was 16.
"I was there [in Chad] when the civil war started. You find that your neighbor who lives next door and had never given you a reason to be suspicious grabs a gun [...]

 
Tsotsi Region 1 DVD (U.S. / Canada / U.S. territories)
Release date: July 17, 2006

Available Subtitles: English, Spanish
Available Audio Tracks: (Dolby Digital 5.1)
Commentary by: Screenwriter / director Gavin Hood
Original language track: Tsotsi-Taal
Alternate endings with optional commentary with Gavin Hood
Deleted scenes with optional commentary with Gavin Hood
"The Making of Tsotsi"
Director’s [...]

Via the Morocco Times: Kamal Kamal’s Moroccan Symphony will be Morocco’s submission for the 2007 Best Foreign-Language Film Academy Award. The film tells the story of a group of people who create an orchestra in order to play a symphony composed by a recently deceased friend. Their ultimate goal is to perform at London’s Albert [...]

Cameroon is currently hosting the Ecrans Noirs (Black Screens) Film Festival, which has been held on a yearly basis - in different Central African nations - since 1995.
Seven countries - Cameroon, Chad, Congo, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon - are the festival’s chief participants, though [...]

The Alwan Film Festival, which is screening more than 30 films from predominantly Muslim countries, is currently taking place in New York City.
Among the upcoming scheduled shorts are Sayid Ali Nasir’s The Miseducation of Pakistan, which "offers a controversial probe into the corruption and nepotism of the education [...]

Via Xinhuanet: South African actress Terry Pheto (Tsotsi) may play Nelson Mandela’s daughter, Zinzi, in Bille August’s Goodbye Bafana, based on Mandela’s memoirs about the unlikely friendship that developed between prison warden James Gregory and South Africa’s future first black president.
Joseph Fiennes (as Gregory), Dennis Haysbert (as Mandela), and Diane Kruger are scheduled [...]

In "Hour of the Thug," Emma Brockes discusses the impact the Academy Award-winning social drama Tsotsi has been having in South African cinema. A brief quote (via The Guardian):
"There are certain headaches you get from making a film in South Africa that you just don’t get in other parts of the world. When Gavin Hood [...]

Ron Derby in allAfrica.com: “Since Tsotsi’s unexpected [Best Foreign-Language Film] Oscar win this week, positive vibes have been reverberating around [South Africa]’s fledgling movie world, with many feeling optimistic about the film industry’s future.
“Particularly excited is Fresh Eye Films director Jonathan Parkinson, who hopes to make a movie of a Zakes Mda novel, Madonna of [...]

Omaret yakobean / The Yacoubian Building, Marwan Hamed’s film version (from a screenplay by his father, Wahid Hamed) of Alaa’ Al-Aswany’s polemical 2002 best-selling novel, is going to be screened at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. A harsh critique of Egyptian society, The Yacoubian Building depicts the lives of several residents of a once grand, [...]

The Independent reports that Kenyan police have arrested two suspects in the murder of British naturalist and wildlife filmmaker Joan Root, who was shot dead on Jan. 13 at her lakeside home in Naivasha, 56 miles northwest of Nairobi. The murder may have been triggered by Root’s efforts to stop illegal fishing in the [...]

Tsotsi (2005)
Director: Gavin Hood. Screenplay: Gavin Hood; from the novel Tsotsi by Athol Fugard. Cast: Presley Chweneyagae, Mothusi Magano, Jerry Mofokeng
 

 
ONE THUG AND A BABY
Mostly spoken in Tsotsi Taal, or "gangster dialect," Tsotsi is the tale of a Johannesburg shantytown hoodlum nicknamed Tsotsi, or "Thug," who rediscovers his humanity after accidentally kidnapping an [...]

At Cinema Minima, correspondent Ogova Ondego talks about the upcoming Cape Town World Cinema Festival, which opens on November 11 with a screening of Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi, South Africa’s submission for the 2006 Best Foreign-Language Film Academy Award.

A selection of notable films screening at the American Film Market in Santa Monica, Calif.
AFI FEST 2005 in [...]

Tsotsi is South Africa’s submission for the 2005 Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award. Directed by Gavin Hood, Tsotsi is the story of a hoodlum who takes care of a baby after shooting the baby’s mother during a carjacking.

“Black Cinema” at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival, including Wayne Beach’s Slow Burn, starring Ray Liotta, Khalo Matabane’s Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon; and Les Saignantes, directed by Jean-Pierre Bekolo.

The Fespaco film festival’s Etalon d’Or de Yennenga (the Golden Stallion of Yennenga) for best African feature film has gone to South African director Zola Maseko’s Drum. The story of anti-Apartheid journalist Henry Nxumalo, Drum is set amid the jazz clubs of 1950s Johannesburg. Maseko also won a cash prize of 10 million CFA francs [...]

The 55th Berlin Film Festival will open on February 10, 2005, with the world premiere of French director Regis Wargnier’s Man to Man, a historical adventure epic starring Joseph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas.
Set in the 1870s, the French-British co-production revolves around a group of anthropologists on a trip to South Africa as they search [...]

Hotel Rwanda (2004)
Director: Terry George. Screenplay: Keir Pearson and Terry George. Cast: Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo, Nick Nolte, Joaquin Phoenix, Desmond Dube
 
NEVER AGAIN. . . UNTIL THE NEXT TIME
In the second quarter of 1994, while much of the world was gearing up to the World Cup to be held in Los Angeles, one [...]

Mohammed Asli’s Casablanca, Where the Angels Don’t Fly, was the winner of the Gold Tanit for best film at the 20th edition of the biennial Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia. Casablanca, Where the Angels Don’t Fly depicts the plight of three migrant Berber workers who try to eke out a living in Morocco’s largest city. [...]