DECEMBER 31, 2013
Okayafrica’s Top 13 Films of 2013
2013 has been an exciting year in African film. This year, nine films by directors of African origin or dealing with Africa-related themes premiered at Sundance Film Festival, including powerful shorts by Fyzal Boulifa and Frances Bodomo (whose forthcoming film Afronauts has been selected for Sundance 2014). Chadian director Mahmat Saleh Haroun and Tunisian-born Abdellatif Kechiche took films to Cannes. Haroun followed Une Homme qui Crie with GriGris , which was not quite as brilliant as his first effort. Kechiche, however, was on the up and up, and his film Blue is the Warmest Colour made him just the second African-descended filmmaker to win Cannes’ top prize, the Palme d’Or.
Film festivals dedicated to African film were replete with fresh, new material. At FESPACO, Alain Gomis, Djamila Sahraoui and Moussa Touré took home top awards, and competitions like the AMAAs rewarded a diverse array of films including directorDavid Tosh Gitonga‘s excellent Nairobi Half Life (2012). We also caught wind of a number of exciting projects on the horizon: fantastically talented filmmaker Nikyatu Jusu is fundraising for her debut feature Free The Town, set in Sierra Leone, as is Yaba Badoe who plans to make a documentary on groundbreaking Ghanaian writer and intellectual Ama Ata Aidoo.
Our best African films of 2013 are powerful, nuanced, formally inventive, or just downright entertaining reflections on our human, political and social condition – whether told through a dramatic, documentary or experimental lens. The films come from Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, South Africa, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Mozambique, Kenya, the UK and the USA. There have been some painful omissions, including Chika Anadu‘s B is for Boy – especially when just four of the films on the list are by African women directors. Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years a Slave was without a doubt the best film of the year, and is omitted here not because it’s insufficiently African (it centers on enslaved Africans in America and stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Lupita Nyong’o and Adepero Oduye) – but because we already have it covered over on Okayplayer.
Confusion Na Wa (dir. Kenneth Gyang)
At the start of Confusion Na Wa, a narrator remarks that since when we die we will inevitably shit ourselves, the best we can hope for is to be wearing brown pants when we meet our maker. The voiceover announces the darkly comedic tone of this refreshing offering from up and coming director Kenneth Gyang. The drama unfolds around a dead okada driver, a phone lost in a scuffle, and a couple of chancers – Charles and Chichi – who steal the phone and blackmail Emeka, its owner. There are drugs, murder, theft and 419, but Gyang treats these potentially heavy topics with a light touch, all while eschewing the Nollywood tendency to moralize. Instead the film strikes a balance between deft social commentary and outright playfulness that you’ll recognize from Fela Kuti’s Confusion, the track from which the film’s title is taken. Stream the Africa Academy Movie Award winner over on DoboxTV.
Mother of George (dir. Andrew Dosunmu)
With cinematography by Sundance award-winning Bradford Young and styling by Mobolaji Dawodu, Andrew Dosunmu‘s Mother of George is without a doubt the most visually sumptuous film of the year. Like Dosunmu’s first feature Restless City (2010), Mother of George is fluid and impressionistic, and privileges the power of gesture to tell a story. The opening shots of his second, more plot-driven feature, embed us in the exquisite detail and elaborate beauty of a Nigerian wedding in New York. Gorgeous as it is, these opening scenes are shot through with both the warmth and security of familial love, and the familial expectations and keenly-policed cultural norms that can characterise close-knit communities. Moving performances from a stellar cast (both Danai Gurira and Isaach de Bankole deserve special mention) unfold a story of love, longing, heartbreak and meddling mothers-in-law – it’s a Naija film after all.
Aya de Yopougon
(dir. Marguerite Abouet & Clément Oubrerie)
The film adaptation of the Aya de Yopougon graphic novels hit French screens this year, directed by the authors Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie. Like the books, the film Aya of Yop City is the story of 19 year old Aya (Aissa Maiga) and her two friends, Adjoua (Tatiana Rogo) and Bintou (Tella Kpomahou). They live in Yopougon aka ”Yop City”, a middle-class neighbourhood in 1970′s Abidjan. Aya wants to get an education so she can become a doctor while her two friends prefer to party at the local maquis and seek out well-off husbands. The adaptation is a delight: from the hand-drawn, boldly colourful aesthetic to the film’s episodic structure which preserves the literary texture of a collection of stories. Aya offers a chance to watch by turns warm, antagonistic and hilarious relationships between African women, refreshing in an industry from which black women and their friendships are markedly absent. Look out for the garish TV commercials from the era which Abouet and Oubrerie use to comment on postcolonial, increasingly capitalist Cote d’Ivoire.
Elysium (dir. Neill Blomkamp)
Director Neill Blomkamp made his name with the stellar sci-fi feature District 9. His second feature, Elysium stars Matt Damon and Jodie Foster. Alongside its compelling visuals, Elysium is a dystopian take on lack of access to healthcare and stringent immigration laws, and is a noteworthy attempt to take third world politics to Hollywood. We’re not really here for Matt Damon’s celebrity humanitarianism, and he’s played some pretty irritating roles (white saviour of South Africa in Invictus for example) but in Blomkamp’s hands he does alright, and as a (relatively) big-budget meditation on the divisions and inequities that continue to structure our worldElysium is worth watching.
Of Good Report (dir. Jahmil XT Qubeka)
Jahmil XT Qubeka‘s Of Good Report was released without a rating and effectively banned, resulting in a tense and widely reported furore over censorship, Qubeka calling the government’s response “a bit fascist.” Eventually the ban was retracted and the film was issued an R rating. Since then, this film noir-influenced portrait of a serial killer in Xhosa and shot entirely in black and white, has been making waves. It opens with a long, agonizing scene during which Parker Sithole (Mothusi Magano) attempts to extract a tooth which has been embedded in his skull. From here, the film develops into a formally inventive edge-of-your-seat thriller. Where it falls short is in its rather hackneyed choices of representation of the young and beautiful Nolitha (Petronella Tshuma). Otherwise, an altogether compelling watch.
Gone too Far (dir. Destiny Ekaragha)
Destiny Ekaragha is a mightily talented young director whose feature debut Gone Too Far lit up this year’s offerings at BFI International Film Festival. The film is an adaptation of Bola Agbaje‘s Olivier award-winning play, and is set on a housing estate in (rapidly gentrifying) Peckham, south London. The film dramatises goings on “on the ends” depicting the tension between a pair of recently acquainted brothers with very different backgrounds and the strain that can exist between London’s West Indian and Nigerian communities. Featuring great performances from a young cast includingMalachi Kirby (Jonah, My Brother the Devil), O.C. Ukeje (Half of a Yellow Sun, Confusion Na Wa), and Shanika Warren-Markland, the film marks Ekaragha as one to watch.
Something Necessary (dir. Judy Kibinge)
Kenyan heavyweight director Judy Kibinge‘s third feature is a portrait of Anne (Susan Wanjiru), a woman struggling to pull her life back together after the election violence in Kenya is a sight to behold. In Kibinge’s own words: “The film raises a powerful question: When the guilt of a perpetrator is examined alongside trauma of a victim, is either one any better or worse than the other?” Something Necessary opens with real video footage of the violence that followed the 2007 elections, and unfolds into a quietly told and beautifully photographed story of a nurse and mother who awakes from a coma to discover that her life has changed irrevocably. The power of the film is that the “big politics” – sexual violence, debt and a country in political turmoil never overshadow the personal drama that is the substance and life of the film, instead we are forced to reckon with the physical and emotional impacts of “big” events on the lives of ordinary people. The wonderful Susan Wanjiru deserves special mention for the heft, vulnerability and nuance she lends to her role.
The Stuart Hall Project (dir. John Akomfrah)
John Akomfrah‘s The Stuart Hall Project weaves archival footage of colonial Jamaica and Britain with social history, philosophy and jazz to explore the life, work, and ideas of Jamaican-born British intellectual Stuart Hall. If Hall’s work has been to show how we might respond to Gramsci’s exhortation ‘Turn your face violently towards things as they exist now,” then Akomfrah (one of the founders of Britain’s Black Audio Film Collective) has carried that conversation into film, finding new ways to speak about the past and present, without slipping into nostalgia (check out Handsworth Songs). Like all of Akomfrah and Hall’s work, The Stuart Hall Project shakes settled notions of identity, nation and blackness.
Le President (dir. Jean Pierre Bekolo)
One of the joys of following Jean Pierre Bekolo‘s work is that each new film is a stylistic departure from the last. Le President, the latest feature from the provocateur of African cinema, is no different. Its handheld, at times neorealist style departs drastically from the noir of Bekolo’s 2005 speculative thriller Les Saignantes, but continues to expose the perversions of vested power, state corruption and their effects on young Africans. In the film, a life-president (ahem, Paul Biya) disappears a few days before the elections. On his travels he talks to citizens and an ex-wife who tell him about the state of the country – not that he can really hear them. It’s a powerful film and a wonderful experiment in form which although slow-moving and sometimes overly-lyrical speaks with anger but never despondency to a political urgent situation. Clearly the Cameroonian government understood Bekolo’s message when they banned the film. Nonetheless, Le President is slated for release by Buni TV.
Aujourd’hui / Tey (dir. Alain Gomis)
Aujourd’hui (Tey) is a slow-moving meditation on life and death as experienced by Satché (Saul Williams), a man recently returned to Senegal from the US who wakes up knowing that by the end of the day (and the film) he will be dead. Supported by stellar performances by Djolof Mbengue, Aissa Maiga and fantastic newcomer Anisia Uzeyman, Satché moves through the mundane (babies playing, a broken door handle) and the “big” political moments (street protests, heated arguments over the state of the nation) which comprise a day, and a life. Rather than the promise of any great “reveal,” what holds this film together is an emotion: the bittersweet ache over our inevitably transient lives and loves. Aujourd’hui is a moving and never nihilistic reflection on human limitation and mortality, a great cinematic achievement which was justly awarded the Special Jury Prize at Carthage Film Festival and the prize for Best Film – the Étalon de Yennenga – at FESPACO.
Kwaku Ananse (dir. Akosua Adoma Owusu) 
It might be unorthodox to include a short film in a best films of the year list, but Akosua Adoma Owusu‘s Kweku Ananse is nothing short of fantastic filmmaking. In just 25 minutes, Owusu’s first fictional short manages to explore the ambivalences of diaspora and the mixed up, ugly feelings that sometimes accompany death and family reunions. Personal but never sentimental, this quiet and fantastical film was received with acclaim at a number of international film festivals, and garnered a Golden Bear Best Short Film nomination at Berlin Film Festival and Best Short Film at the Africa Movie Academy Awards. Aside from Kweku, it’s been a massive year for Owusu. Four of her experimental shorts were acquired by the Whitney Museum in New York. Look out too for the fruit of her successful crowdfunding campaign to renovate Accra’s REX Cinema.
Virgin Margarida (dir. Licínio Azevedo)
Under the direction of Brazilian filmmaker Licínio Azevedo, Virgin Margarida takes on one of the lesser-told stories of Mozambiquan independence. Following 1975, the revolutionary army’s “cleansing movement” forcibly removed sex workers from the streets to re-education camps. The film tells the story of sixteen-year old Margarida who gets swept up in this post-independence drama, and is a powerful reflection on the fallout of masculinist independence movements. Despite its official release in September 2012, it makes this year’s list because it only really started doing the rounds this year.
God Loves Uganda (dir. Roger Ross Williams)
African-American filmmaker Roger Ross Williams’s first feature-length documentary takes a revealing look at Western missionary activity in Uganda, exposing its role in fomenting and funding hatred of LGBTI people. Beautifully shot, and occasionally darkly funny God Loves Uganda delivers its urgent message with panache. By exposing the link between U.S. culture wars and American missionary zeal, God Loves Uganda blows apart the assumption that Africa is somehow ‘naturally’ homophobic (in contrast to Western nation’s progressive civil society), instead showing the complex transnational dynamics that inform attitudes to homosexuality in Uganda. The film is particularly important for understanding Uganda’s new anti-gay and anti-woman laws, a bill that Williams discussed in our interview with him earlier this year.
>via: http://www.okayafrica.com/2013/12/31/african-films-2013-best-of/