Bye Bye Africa is a 1999 award winning Chadian film. It was the first by Chadian director Mahamat Saleh Haroun, who also starred. The docu-drama centers on a fictionalized version of Haroun.
A Chadian film director who lives and works in France (Haroun) returns home upon the death of his mother. He is shocked at the degraded state of the country and the national cinema. Encountering skepticism from his family members about his chosen career, Haroun tries to defend himself by quoting Jean-Luc Godard: “The cinema creates memories.” The filmmaker decides to make a film dedicated to his mother entitled Bye Bye Africa but immediately encounters major problems. Cinemas have closed and financing is impossible to secure. The director reunites with an old girlfriend (Yelena), who was shunned by Chadians who could not distinguish between film and reality after appearing in one of his previous films as an HIV victim. Haroun learns about the destruction of the African cinema from directors in neighboring countries, but also finds Issa Serge Coelo shooting his first film, Daressalam. Things go badly and, convinced that it is impossible to make films in Africa, Haroun departs Chad in despair, leaving his film camera to a young boy who had been assisting him.
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Come Back, Africa is the second feature-length film written, produced, and directed by American independent filmmaker Lionel Rogosin. The film had a profound effect on African Cinema, and remains of great historical and cultural importance as a document preserving the unique heritage of the townships in South Africa in the 1950’s.
This story of a Zulu family is a composite story of events enacted by Africans whose experiences resembled the story’s events. Forced out of his village by famine, Zachariah leaves his family to take the only work available: in the gold mines near Johannesburg. Seeking better than a slave wage, he settles with his wife and children in a bleak room in a crumbling shack on the outskirts of the city. Here he confronts the pass laws – hundreds of laws which he did not know existed- restricting his every move: he cannot find work without a pass, and he cannot get a pass without work. At the same time he is constantly threatened with banishment or imprisonment if he is unemployed too long, or fails to comply with petty restrictions. Zachariah drifts through a succession of jobs- domestic servant, garage attendant, waiter, road gang laborer- tormented, insulted, and degraded by white employers who summarily dismiss him because of his ignorance or out of malice. In addition, he falls foul of Marumu, the leader of a gang of “tsotsis” (young black hoodlums) who are terrorizing the streets of Sophiatown. Fearful that poverty will drive her son to the street gangs, his wife takes a job as a domestic servant where she must live on premises, separated from her family. Zachariah is caught sleeping with Vinah during a nightly police raid and is arrested for trespassing. He returns from prison to find his wife dead, murdered by Murumu because she refused to give in to his sexual demands.
Inexorably Zachariah’s overwhelming helplessness and frustration reveal the social impoverishment of all African men, women, and children. Starved off the land after confiscation by successive governments, the black man is uprooted from his native soil and forced continually to search for a home and livelihood. Deprived of political power, he must weave a treacherous path of survival among the myriad written and unwritten laws that govern black contact with the white world. – laws which are often contradictory and inevitably result in severe penalties. The family is increasingly torn apart when both parents must work to buy bread, leaving their children to grow up amid the violence and filth of the streets. In the end, the African is completely defenseless in his struggle to survive, inhumanely pulled between the capricious brutality of white law and the wanton violence of the black outlaw.
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Divizionz is a guerilla film shot in Kampala, Uganda. Directed by Yes! That’s Us and produced by Deddac, Switch Media, Bigtime Entertainments and Collywood Films. The Film is represented by Wide ManagementKapo, Bana, Kanyankole and Mulokole are 4 youths that originally come from 4 regions of the country (Eastern, Central, Western and Northern respectively) but now live in a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city in the “Central Division, particularly in Zone B4. They are all aspiring musicians, with each character representing stereotypical characteristics of people from these 4 regions.
Through a contact, they have been offered a performance slot at a pub in the city that is starting “open mic sessions” locally dubbed Karaoke. Kapo quits his job and raises some money to buy a disc, on which him and his crew will perform, plus transport fare to the city. They are ambushed by “City Graduated Tax Enforcement Officers” before they can get to the city. After this, they find themselves with no money and no disc. In their quest to get to the city, they experience obstacles that test their friendship and mission.
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Fimbo ya Baba (`Fathers` stick`)
An HIVC/Aids film produced in Pangani, Tanga Region, won a commendation by the Signis Jury and scooped the Signis Award during the 2007 Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF).
In a powerful way the film shows the plight of young women in rural Tanzania that are caused by socio-cultural norms and practices so deeply rooted in the local communities and cultures.
Fimbo ya Baba is the first rural film produced by the Pangani-based NGO UZIKWASA in collaboration with Dr. Augustin Hatar of the University of Dar es Salaam, and Nkwabi Nghangasamala of the Bagamoyo College of Arts. It was directed by Chande Omar, who is also the director of Television Zanzibar.
