I didn’t know about the events in Heliopolis before seeing this film. That’s because we learn fuck all about Empire. True, this is France’s empire, but if there was room on the curriculum for me to learn about Schleswig-Holstein in the German Wars of Unification, there was time for this. A fucking degree I have…
A retired rapper comes to work at an arts centre in an underprivileged neighbourhood of Casablanca, teaching the kids to express themselves through rap and hip hop. They start out a bit rough, but as time goes on they learn and grow, and each kid does a rap about what’s going on in their lives,…
Of all the films at this year’s GFF, this was the one I was most looking forward to. A South African horror, Good Madam focuses on multiple generations of women living in the house of the white employer of the grandmother. Despite being elderly, in failing health, and confined to her upstairs bedroom, Madam’s silent…
Sambizanga is the story of Domingos and Maria, a young couple in 1960s Portuguese colonial Angola. Domingos is a good man, a dedicated father and husband, and is secretly an activist for Angolan independence. One day the police kick in his door and drag him out his house, beat hell out him and fling him…
Once Upon A Time In Uganda is a documentary about Wakaliwood, where Isaac Nabwana makes low-budget, high-octane action flicks. Isaac is based in Wakaliga, a ghetto in the capital city of Uganda, Kampala. There he makes movies for as little as £200, and puts them out to his neighbours. When Alan, a superfan from America…
A simple and straightforward story. Guled is a gravedigger, his wife Nasra needs an operation to remove her kidney or she’ll die, he tries to raise the money for the operation. Beautifully shot, eschewing artifice for directness. Other people might have made this film as a tragic story, about poverty and preventable illness in the…
Blind Ambition is a documentary following the first Zimbabwean team to compete in the world blind wine taste testing championships. Now if you’re like me, the most you know about blind wine tasting is that scene from Frasier where Niles is crowned corkmaster, and they all sing, “Hail corkmaster! The master of the cork! He…