Review
Mauritania0:00/373.2266671× It’s haunting when a film is made so beautifully yet the subject matter is so harrowing. Timbuktu, my Mauritanian entry from 2014, concerns the jihadist takeover of the city by Islamic extremist group Ansar Dine in 2012. Timbuktu itself is in Mauritania’s neighbour Mali,
Review
Eswatini0:00/289.5146671× The reason I’m favouring horror isn’t because I like being scared (although I freely admit that I do) but because extremes push us to show our real selves. Well, as much as narrative fiction can anyway. Buying a film from every country isn’t
Review
Equatorial Guinea0:00/331.1573331× I should probably stop opening these pieces with “Now, I don’t know much about…” because it’s starting to make me sound unusually parochial, but in the case of Equatorial Guinea all I know is that it’s probably on the equator (and that’
Review
Lesotho0:00/187.1146671× You can never underestimate the importance of a title. There are whole teams in Hollywood who work with focus groups just to make sure that the title of the next blockbuster works. Or resonates, as they’re more likely to say. Vibes, probably. They’re titlemaxxing,
Review
Burkina Faso0:00/264.3413331× It became clear quite quickly that much of Africa was going to be an issue for me. I faced three distinct problems: 1. I need a film on disc 2. I need subtitles 3. I am not in Africa Nearly all countries in Africa have
Review
Chad0:00/280.5546671× In case I’ve not already made it clear, I should explain what I’m looking for in a film. I want to be entertained, yes, but I also want to be treated as an intelligent adult: I don’t want to be given easy answers
Review
Algeria0:00/164.0746671× It was always going to happen eventually: I was going to see a film I didn’t like. I’d half-expected it to be the first film I watched (irony is like that) but was surprised by my raunchy thriller from the Democratic Republic of
Review
Senegal0:00/203.4986671× Senegal’s The Pirogue (2012) was billed as a drama, so I was rather unprepared for what turned out to be a harrowing survival movie. The plot itself could be from any current newspaper headline: a group of illegal immigrants attempt a secretive sea crossing (in
Review
DRC0:00/219.4561× I know very little about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, so I had no idea what to expect of a film from there. I knew it was a thriller. I knew it was the first film that had been made in the country for quite