WHAT I LOVE ABOUT SUB-SAHARAN CINEMA

The Afrofuturist director explores how East African cinema subverts the colonial gaze and reclaims its storytelling traditions.

In East Africa, there’s a long history of colonial films with a white male gaze about us and our people. The main references for Uganda in particular are The Last King of Scotland and Kony 2012 — both highly problematic, racist, ahistorical versions of Uganda. 

Part of why I became a filmmaker is to subvert these colonial gazes and capture the joys and struggles of our people from true and personal East African perspectives. 

My favorite film is This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection. Made by Lemohang Mosese of Lesotho, it follows a community that is being forced to vacate its ancestral land to make way for a dam. It represents everything that is African cinema. It has no heroes except the community; our stories are not about mere individuals. When characters do stand out, they do not resemble the protagonists of Hollywood. 

The lead in this beautiful film is an old woman who is grieving. Her wrinkles are beautiful and her experience is wide. Her sorrow is present and acknowledged as she finds a gravedigger to dig her grave while she’s still alive. 

It’s a poetic film, but it’s not too abstract to be inaccessible. It is at once relatable, rebellious, and traditional. 

From Uganda I have no feature films to recommend, but instead a television episode on Disney+. The animated series Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire is an anthology of African stories. Episode one, “Herder Boy,” is directed by the talented Raymond Olinga. It combines two of my favorite elements of content: Afrofuturism and ancient knowledge. The visual references in this story are very beautifully Ugandan, decolonized, and celebratory of mythology. African storytelling often looks back in order to prophecy the future, and this story has all of it. 

A few other Sub-Saharan films I love include shorts like Pumzi from Kenya by Wanuri Kahiu, and I am Not a Witch by Rungano Nyoni. Many of our stories have authoritative women characters at the center, whose struggles are layered and complex. It takes a lot of unlearning Western forms of storytelling to circle back to our African values. Femininity was not so fragile prior to colonizers overwriting our ways of life. I love it when the rebellion and rebirth of our ancient ways of life show up on the screen.▮