Playlist
<p>A documentary about a case of modern slavery in one of the largest sugar cane plantations in the world, located in the Dominican Republic and belonging to the Fanjul Family, one of the most powerful families in America.</p>
<p>A trip that will take us to 7 African countries (Ghana, Senegal, Rwanda, Mozambique, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Burundi) to meet powerful women determined to do everything possible to offer a better future to the African people. These women will explain how they think they are working to save the continent, which must resolutely embrace integration into the world economy because the years of totalitarian male rule in Africa have been catastrophic. A film that will make us understand that the future of Africa belongs to women.</p>
<p>You're My Favourite Place chronicles the journey of 4 apathetic and despondent high school matriculants from the turbulent township of Duncan Village, as they steal a minibus taxi and embark on a defining road trip to “Hole in the Wall”, which rumour has it, is a portal to the ancestors.</p>
<p>A poor sharecropper challenges the political elite to become the voice for millions fighting for the right to vote.</p>
<p>A documentary film about the taboos, stereotypes, and struggles of black actors in Brazilian television "soaps". Based on his own memories and on a sturdy body of research evidence, the director analyses race relations in Brazilian soap operas, calling attention to their likely influence on Brazilian African-Americans' identity-forming processes.</p>
<p>An 11-year-old street boy, Obdulio, who sells newspapers for a living but cannot read or write, finds a magical "Maestro" in the night watchman of the newspaper's office. Obdulio's charismatic mentor not only introduces him to the world of literacy but also teaches him the real meaning of life through the lyrics of the "Murgas" [Carnival Pierrots] during the magical nights of the irreverent and provocative Uruguayan Carnival.</p>
<p><em>Get Out Alive </em>is an autobiographical musical documentary giving voice to a troubled artist's recovery after a suicide attempt. Using storytelling, song, dance, and visual media, Nikki Lynette’s personal and unapologetic approach to sharing her personal mental health journey shows that even when life leads us to a bad place, we can always make it out alive.</p>
<p>During the Covid pandemic, two lost souls find themselves confined together. Fettah is a music teacher locked up forever in his blindness, and Habiba is his student, a young lady fleeing the obscurantism of her village. The hotel where Habiba was staying is closing. With no way to go home, she has to move in with her music teacher. They reveal themselves to each other. Fettah talks about his family who left him because of his disability while Habiba talks about how she ran away to realize her dream of becoming a musician... Beyond the frustration, a complicity will be born to turn into love…</p>
<p>Kafe Negro tells the story of migrations around a small grain that became the second most important raw material on the global market. This film tells the story of the waves of migration of Haitian workers who, over time, profoundly transformed the culture and demography of Cuba and developed coffee growing on the island.</p>
<p>Imogene “Queenie” Kennedy was a contemporary priestess in post-colonial Jamaica who catapulted her African spiritual practice into renown. But after centuries of erasure, what remains of the dance between the living and the dead? In the wake of the loss of her mother, the filmmaker travels into the heart of Jamaican countryside to research kumina, an ancestral ritual. The ancient practice, she learns, is a driving force in Jamaica's culture and identity, yet during the colonial period, its leaders were discarded as witches and even criminalized. Today, Queenie's mysterious world of spirit possession reveals divergent pathways to freedom, healing, and transformation--to those who choose it.</p>
<p>Director Anna Marbrook honours the last voyage of the great waka maker, sailor and mentor Ema Siope, whose journeys between Aotearoa and Sāmoa in search of healing, and her family’s reckoning with systemic abuse, are powerfully documented.</p>
<p>Minga is an orphaned girl living with her stepmother Mami Kaba and her stepsister Abena. One day, when she was washing dishes in the river, she accidentally broke a spoon. A furious Mami Kaba then chased her away from the house, asking her to find the only identical spoon hidden by her late mother. A adventurous journey then begins for Minga in the forest.</p>
<p>In Ouidah, Benin, the district “The Pantheon of Joy” is the nation of the forgotten, of singers in rags, of dust, of poverty and, nevertheless, of joy.</p> <p>When, at 12 years old, a fatherless boy becomes the breadwinner of his family, his eyes widen before the villa under construction of a Big Brother who seems to have conquered Europe. And even thought the house is never finished, and the Big Brother might be a legend more than a reality… One must imitate him, at any cost....</p> <p>In Ouidah, Benin, the district "The Pantheon of Joy". The nation of the forgotten, of singers in rags, of dust, of poverty and, nevertheless, of joy. When, at 12 years old, one is fatherless and becomes the breadwinner of a family, one's eyes widen before the villa under construction of a Big Brother who seems to have conquered Europe. And so much the worse if the house does not finish being built, and so much the worse if this Big Brother whom one does not know is more a legend than a reality... One must imitate him, become "little President Macron", until the irreparable : to sing, to dance, to ask for alms and to quench one's hunger by stealing a tomato, and then to trigger the popular vindictiveness which ends in the « live brazing ».</p>
<p>An award-winning provocative news documentary that raises the question of whether or not women of color may be suffering from a self- image disorder as a result of trying to attain the standards of beauty that are celebrated in media images.</p>
<p>Nairobi, Kenya. 14 year-old Abila lives with his parents in Kibera, one of the largest slums in East Africa. One morning the teenager discovers his father ill and delirious. Someone has stolen his soul, mumbles the father as he sits huddled in a corner. Abila is shocked and confused but wants to help his father and goes in search of a suitable cure. Supported by his friend Shiku who is the same age as him, he learns that his father has gambled his soul away in the company of a spiritual woman. The teenager doesn’t want to believe it and sets about looking for the witch. When he finally discovers her in the darkest corner of the ghetto, she gives him seven challenging tasks to save his father’s lost soul. Abila embarks on an adventurous journey which leads him right through the microcosm of his home town</p>
<p>In Tunisia, the history of stambali goes back to the arrival of the first Africans taken as slaves from Mali, Timbuktu specifically. Practicing their music and worship in the house of their masters, the enslaved and their musical traditions survive to this day.</p> <p>Stambali is a religious ritual in Tunisia, a journey with the rhythm of the "gombri" and "chkackek," traces an individual and collective hypnosis, an annual tribute that the disciples of Sidi Saad pay to their master during an initiatory journey and rite of purification that lasts three days.</p> <p>In "Stambali," the camera, video and film follow the rhythm of the possession, dances, and goes into a trance, in the cemetery, in an open space of grass, trees, dust and sand, in the eroticism that is released by this physical and spiritual representation.</p>
<p>After the slave revolt of 1641, groups of enslaved black Brazilians escaped to mountainous jungle strongholds where they formed self-governing communities. This historic epic drama chronicles the story of the most famous of these African enclaves which flourished for several decades under the reign of the legendary chieftain Ganga Zumba. </p>