₦airaland Forum

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Africa has a very rich culture and has tried to portray this in most African songs and movies that has been acted. But when the story is not about the culture, there are many other things to be presented through the media. Africa is a continent that has come through a long way; having been largely shaped and influenced by wars, strife, famine, health challenges and political instability, Africa has a lot to present in the media through African Movies . Being home to
Nollywood which is the third largest movie industry in the world, the Ghollywood (Ghana Movie Industry), the South African and Kenyan cinemas, it cannot help but produce some interesting and classic movies that keep reverberating through the ages. Answers Africa brings you the top 10 classic African movies .

10. Guelwaar
Written and directed by Ousmane Sembene one of Africa’s best film makers, Guelwaar could not but become one of Africa’s best film. Setting of the movie was in Senegal and the story was that a murder mystery began to unfold around the death of a district leader whose family had gathered at the funeral.

9. Sarafina!
Sarafina! is a 1992 South African film starring Leleti Khumalo, Whoopi Goldberg, Miriam Makeba, John Kani and Tertius Meintjies. The film was shot on location in Soweto and Johannesburg, South Africa and was directed by Darrell Roodt. Synopsis: The movie is about students that are involved in the Soweto Riots. The riots are staged to emphasize the opposition to the implementation of Afrikaans as the teaching language in schools. The character Sarafina (Leleti Khumalo) feels shame at her mother’s (Miriam Makeba) acceptance of her role as domestic servant in a white household during the apartheid in South Africa, and inspires her peers to rise up in protest, especially after her inspirational teacher, Mary Masombuka (Whoopi Goldberg) is imprisoned.

8. Viva Riva!
Viva Riva! is a Congolese crime thriller movie written & directed by Djo Tunda Wa Munga and starring Patsha Bay, Manie Malone, Hoji Fortuna, Marlene Longage, Alex Herabo & Diplôme Amekindra. The film received 12 nominations and won 6 awards at the 7th African Movie Academy Awardsin 2011, including the awards for Best Picture , Best Director , Best Cinematography & Best Production Design . Viva Riva! also won at the 2011 MTV Movie Awards for Best African Movie. Story Line: Riva is a small time operator who has just returned to his hometown of Kinshasa, Congo after spending 10 years away with a major score: a fortune in hijacked gasoline. With wads of cash ready to spend, he is out for a good time then Riva soon becomes entranced by a very pretty night club Nora who happens to be the kept woman of a local gangster. An Angolan crime lord steps into the picture and is relentlessly seeking the return of his stolen shipment of gasoline.

7. The Gods Must Be Crazy
The Gods Must Be Crazy is an old movie released during the era of VHS and 180 minutes maximum video play This is the period when after watching your movie, you have no option than to slot in the cassette in another “video cassette player-like” device called re-winder. The Gods must be crazy was a very popular and hilarious South African movie which was written and directed by Jamie Uys and set in Botswana, it tells the story of Xi, a Sho of theKalahari Desert whose band has no knowledge of the world beyond until a bottle of Coca cola fell from sky and the whole story changed.

6. Tsotsi
Tsotsi is a South African Movie directed by Gavin Hoodin in which the dark underground life of the golden city, Johannesburg, becomes revealed in the life of a teenage township tsotsi (thug) in Soweto. Within a 6-day rampage, hell was let lose with cases of robbery, violence, car theft and murder. A woman had no option than to give birth at the back of a car and Tsotsi takes the baby to his slum where it begins to arouse deep emotions that is be hoped to result in redemption … but it is a little too late for this victim of his own birth. Tsotsi won the 2006 Oscar award for best foreign language film.

5. Sitanda
Sitanda is one of the best African movies . It is a Nigerian Nollywood adventure/drama film written by Fidel Akpom and directed by African Movie Academy Award winner Izu Ojukwu. Sitanda received 9 nominations and won 5 awards at the African Movie Academy Awards in 2007, including Best Picture, Best Nigerian Film, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.

4. From a Whisper
From a Whisper is an African movie of Kenyan origin written and directed by Wanuri Kahiu. From a Whisper is based on the events surrounding the bomb attacks on the US Embassy in Nairobi on the 7th August 1998. In the movie, Abu is an intelligence officer who loves being reserved but on meeting Tamani, a young, rebellious artist in search of her mother, he decides to help. The discovery of her death churns up memories of Fareed, Abu’s best friend who also lost his life in the attack. The discovery and memories teaches them how to forgive, to believe in themselves and confront what they fear the most – the truth. Following 12 nominations the movie received, it won 5 awards at the African Movie Academy Awards in 2009, including Best Original Soundtrack, Best Director , Best Picture , Best Original Screenplay and AMAA Achievement in Editing. In 2012, the movie also won the Best Feature Narrative award at the Pan African Film & Arts Festival and was honored with the 2010 BAFTA/LA Festival Choice Prize . The movie is not strictly about the terrorist bombing despite commemorating the 10th anniversary of the August 7th, 1998 terrorist bombing in Kenya. rather it paints a clear picture of the bombing aftermath and portrays the lives of the victims and their families who had to pick up the pieces of their lives shredded by the blast.

3. The Last King of Scotland
The Last King of Scotland is a movie about a young doctor working on a Ugandan medical mission whose brazen attitude in a moment of crisis earns him a spot close to the self appointed leader as his personal physician and a close confidate. He becomes irreversibly engaged with one of the world’s most brutal dictators: Idi Amin. The movie won Forest Whitaker who plays Idi Amin the best acting oscar for his incredible performance. The Last King of Scotland was also set in Uganda.

2. The Figurine
The synopsis of Figurine (Araromire) shows that it is a story of two buddies and a girl…all down on their luck have their lives changed when one of them discovers ‘Araromire’ a mystical sculpture in an abandoned shrine in the forest, while they are serving at a National Youth Service Corps camp which, according to legend bestows seven years of good luck. But no one told them about the next seven years. In 2010, the Figurine received 10 nominations and won 5 awards at the African Movie Academy Awards.

1. How To Steal 2 Million
“How To Steal 2 Million” is one of the best African movies that has been acted. Produced in 2011 and directed by Charlie Vundla. Lead character Jack, after serving five years for a robbery gone bad. Twala was never caught and Jack never talked. Jack wants to go legit and forget his old lifestyle but after being rejected a loan. Twala presents him with a job of R2 million in partnership with the sexy but tough Olive. The complication in the job is that the mark is Twala’s father and little does he know she will prove to be more devious then his old friend. The South African Movie had 11 nominations and won 4 awards at the African Movie Academy Awards in 2012.


http://www.awoboyz.com/2016/03/10-best-african-movies-of-all-times.html

To celebrate Africa Express rolling out across the UK, here's a guide to 10 classic films to have come from the continent

A monster of a movie ... director Neill

Blomkamp's Joburg sci-fi, District 9. Photograph: Allstar/Sony Pictures/Sportsphoto Ltd
Mark Cousins
Monday 3 September 2012 17.15 BST
Last modified on Thursday 28 January 2016
18.02 GMT
Africa played no part in the invention of cinema. For decades, in Tarzan movies, it was the subject of fake Hollywood fantasies. And yet, when Africans made films about themselves, the results were astonishing.
African movies. Here are 10 of the best:
Cairo Station (Egypt, 1958)
If Alfred Hitchcock had been Egyptian and bisexual, and had himself played Norman Bates,
Psycho might have been something like this. Sweaty, musical, melodramatic and political, Cairo Station stars ballsy writer-director Youssef Chahine as a homicidal newspaper seller in Cairo's vast railway station. In the 1950s, movies such as Rebel without a Cause and All That Heaven Allows were about repression as a ticking time bomb, but Chahine's film about sexual desire with no outlet was one of the biggest cinematic bombs of the decade.

Sambizanga (1973, Congo/Angola)
I've only seen this film once, but will never forget images as bold, as well-lit as Caravaggio paintings. It's a modern, radical account of a woman going from prison to prison, looking for her husband. The setting is Angola, but it was filmed in Congo. Director Sarah Maldoror studied in Moscow, worked on the classic The Battle of Algiers, then grabbed African cinema by the scruff of the neck, forcing it to engage with feminism, loss and movie aesthetics. Wow.

Chronicle of the Year of Embers (Algeria, 1975)
Here's cinema as a history painting, as epic as Bertolucci's 1900 . If our movie memories weren't Hollywood-skewed, we'd think of Chronicle of the Years of Embers as a classic but, despite winning the Palme d'or in Cannes in 1975, Mohammad Lakhdar-Hamina 's film has fallen into the shadows. Which is what it's about, in a way. An Algerian peasant from a tiny village is drawn into the de-colonial struggle. A deranged, homeless soothsayer (played by the director himself) jokes and japes at history. A cast of thousands, fascinating politics, bravura staging.

The Wind (Mali, 1983)
A Romeo and Juliet story. The star-crossed lovers take drugs, try to pass exams, get involved with student politics. The Wind, by Africa's greatest living director Souleymane Cissé, has the flavour of 60s hippy movies from America, but his story casts long shadows. She's from a modern Malian military family; his roots are tribal, magical. Against this fresco of African life they try to find erotic, sincere, funny moments together. The imagery is gorgeous, the music modernist and unforgettable, the ending is mythic.

Hyenas (Senegal, 1992)
Don't know where to start with African film? Try this gobsmacking film by Senegal's punk master-director Djibril Diop Mambéty . The story (from a Friedrich Dürrenmatt play) tells of a woman who, jilted by her lover, goes abroad, gets as rich as the world bank, then returns home, half made of gold. Yes, it's that surreal. What does the woman find when she gets back? An avaricious, vacuous Africa, in love with TV soap operas and fridges. The twist in the story shocks, but what's really daring is that the village where Mambety sets the tale, where he pins his nation to the wall, is … his hometown. Mambéty was Africa's Orson Welles.

Guelwaar (Senegal, 1993)
In the same year as Hyenas, Africa's founding father filmmaker Ousmane Sembène made this gripping, state of the nation film. A Catholic and a Muslim die on the same day. The Islamic villagers claim the body of their guy, and bury him at once, as is the Islamic custom. But they got the Catholic's body. And he was a dissident. And was probably killed by the authorities for arguing against accepting foreign aid for Senegal. Sembène takes this brilliant scenario (based on a true story) and turns it into a chess game of multiple characters, an engrossing drama about African religion and, underneath that, a film about African pride. The final scene is astonishing (and seriously challenging for anyone who has given money to African charities) and the four songs by Baaba Maal are the film's soul.

The Silences of the Palace (Tunisia, 1994)
There are so many flashbacks in African films, it's as though the continent is always remembering. Former film editor Moufida Tlatli makes this film all about flashbacks. A young woman at the end of French rule in Tunisia begins to realise that her beautiful mother's servitude in colonial times was sexual as well as economic. Where some of the above films are full of attack, this one is more dreamlike, but no less political. And if Tlatli's career wasn't already interesting enough, in the Arab spring, after the fall of the Tunisian government, she became culture minister in the new provisional government. The film was co-written by another great Tunisian director, Nouri Bouzid.

Keita, The Heritage of the Griot (Burkina Faso, 1996)
One of the world's poorest countries, Burkina Faso is also one of the world's most cinephile countries. Dani Kouyaté's winning film shows a bright, modern boy learning the Darwinian facts of history. But then a traditional storyteller tells him the mythic version – a 13th-century tale about the Mande people. Kouyaté's father, a real-life Griot, plays the storyteller and brings the magic-realist version of history alive. How does the boy reconcile the two versions? How do we live life as both poetry and prose? This gentle film has near-universal zing.

Waiting for Happiness (Mauritania, 2002)
The first knock-out African film I saw in the new millennium was this burnished mood-piece. It pictures Mauritania as a kind of limbo, where everyone is waiting, watching, dreaming of going to France or elsewhere. A boy tries to install an electric light. A rootless man's shirt is the exact same material as his curtains and sofa. As these people drift and dream we see, through their eyes, street scenes of utter beauty, and we hear, through their ears, Malian Oumou Sangaré 's gorgeous score.

District 9 (South Africa, 2009)
I don't need to say much about South African wunderkind Neill Blomkamp's ET-in-the-slums-of-Joburg roller coaster, except that it was the best African sci-fi film since Souleymane Cissé's masterpiece Yeelen/Brightness , made more than 20 years earlier.

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