In this course, we will consider a set of contemporary African films that stand out both for their exceptional aesthetic quality as well as their remarkable ability to confront pressing political and social issues.
How are African filmmakers tackling questions of migration, gender, sexuality, and economic power, questions that also reverberate around the world? What particular African modes of storytelling do African filmmakers employ? How do African filmmakers enable us to view everyday African experiences that we rarely glimpse on the big screen? And how do they challenge and resist the dominant western tropes of representing Africa, which often render Africa as a spectacle and thwart the continent’s interior life? To explore these questions, we will consider the following films—Bamako, Timbuktu, Difret, Mother of George, and Stories of Our Lives—along with a set of short critical readings on Africa and African cinema.
Dagmawi Woubshet, Ahuja Family Presidential Associate Professor of English