Twenty Years of African Cinema

Some 70 years after cinema was invented, and after more than half a century of colonial cinema in which Africa was used as an exotic backdrop but its inhabitants were often depicted as less than human and portrayed in ways that undermined their dignity, Africans in newly independent countries were finally able to operate the camera themselves. Filming in the face of insurmountable obstacles, lacking both equipment and infrastructures, taking whatever support they could get from within Africa or elsewhere, they strove to convey the many and varied realities of Africa as seen by the Africans who had so long been debarred from self-expression. Shot over a decade, Twenty Years of African Cinema relates the first 20 years of the new cohorts of creative film-makers that emerged in sub-Saharan Africa, documenting an unprecedented hunger for expression that remains unsated to this day.