Synopsis
In the late 1980s, private security guard Louis van Schoor fatally shot at least 39 people in the South African city of East London. All of his victims were Black. The youngest was just 12 years old.

Van Schoor was arrested in 1991. With many of his shootings signed off by local police as “justifiable homicides,” he served just 12 years in prison after being convicted of only seven of the murders.

Free from prison, he is finally ready to speak, even as, 30 years on, his victims are still fighting for closure and justice.

Accolades
• Best TV Feature Documentary nominee, International Documentary Association
• Over a million views on YouTube
• Nominated at AIB & longlisted for a Grierson Award

South Africa | 2024 | 75m

Did you know?
The Apartheid Killer is co-directed by South African Isa-Lee Jacobson and Charlie Northcott.

Jacobson had spent 20 years investigating van Schoor and made the documentary Daddy’s Girl about van Schoor’s daughter.

Northcott previously made the International Emmy-nominated documentaries Black Axe and Sweet Sweet Codeine, as well as the Peabody-winning Anatomy of a Killing.

Van Schoor passed away in 2024 at 73. Northcott wrote his obituary for the BBC.

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Synopsis
As Moudou attempts to emigrate from Senegal, his patience and resilience are tested. He is sustained by hope for what lies ahead and memories of what came before.

Accolades
• Over 10 international awards
• Over a million YouTube views
• Premiered on Nowness

Senegal | 2025 | 11m

Did you know?
Patience features a cameo and a sample from Amadou & Mariam and their track Sabali, which was produced by Damon Albarn. This was one of the final on-screen appearances of the Grammy-nominated couple from Mali, who were both blind from childhood. Amadou Bagayoko passed away in 2025, age 70, just before the short was released.

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Synopsis
With her marine environment changing beyond her control, a traditional Vezo fisherwoman lives on a knife edge.

Accolades
• Won seven international awards
• Honourable Mention, Jackson Wild (“nature film’s equivalent to the Oscars”)
• Featured on Greenpeace's Vital Ocean Voices

Madagascar | 2019 | 15 min

Did you know?
Filmed over four months, Kokoly is presented by the Sundance Institute’s Stories of Change initiative.

Want to know what happened when Kokoly’s village watched the film?
Read more here.

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BBC Africa Eye investigative journalist Runako Celina

Synopsis
You may think you know this story. 23-year-old Mona Kizz was a Ugandan influencer who became known as “the queen of #Dubaiportapotty” - a disturbing online trend of Arab men pooping in African women’s mouths. When the clip went viral, she jumped to her death from a Dubai high-rise.

Except that’s not the truth. BBC Africa Eye investigative journalist Runako Celina says, “The internet is wrong about Mona Kizz, whose real name is Monic Karungi, and the reality is even darker than I could have imagined.”

The documentary investigates allegations that Ugandan women are being lured to Dubai with promises of work, only to be forced into prostitution. It shows that Monic was not the only woman to fall to her death from a Dubai high-rise - and raises questions about whether either death was really a suicide.

Accolades
• Winner: 2026 Current Affairs: International - Royal Television Society Television Journalism Award
• Shortlisted: Best Documentary, Broadcast Digital Awards.
• Over 1.8 million views on YouTube

Uganda | 2025 | 64 min

Did you know?

You can listen to the Gracie-winning podcast here. It was also a finalist at the Amnesty Media Awards

The original BBC article on the documentary is here.

If you have any information to add to this investigation, please contact runako@bbc.co.uk

Details of organisations offering information about or support after sexual abuse or with feelings of despair are available at bbc.co.uk/actionline.

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Robert Liensol in Soleil Ô (Oh Sun)

Synopsis
Med Hondo is best known to much of Europe for dubbing Eddie Murphy’s character, Donkey, into French in the Oscar-winning animated film Shrek. He also dubbed Rafiki in The Lion King, Dillon in Predator and Hallorann in The Shining.

The Al Jazeera documentary, Med Hondo: A founding father of African cinema, shifts the focus back onto his celebrated career as a director, which was partly funded by his dubbing work.

His debut feature, Soleil Ô (Oh Sun), about a Mauritanian who emigrates to Paris, won the top prize at Locarno in 1970 and screened at Berlin and Cannes Critics’ Week. It was briefly banned in France but now regularly appears in lists of the top 10 African films of all time, from the BFI to the Tarifa-Tangiers African Film Festival (FCAT)

Nous aurons toute la mort pour dormir, his documentary on the Sahrawi independence movement in Western Sahara, won the Forum of New Cinema Prize at Berlin in 1977. His later films won the top awards at key African festivals like Carthage (Arabs and N*ggers, Your Neighbours) and FESPACO (Sarraounia).

All this after stowing away on a ship from Mauritania to France and facing police scrutiny in Marseille because he lacked legal papers.

Soleil Ô was the first film restored under the African Film Heritage Project, the initiative launched by Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation, UNESCO, FEPACI and Cineteca di Bologna to preserve African cinema. Hondo was actively involved in the restoration and lived to see Soleil Ô rediscovered by a new generation of critics after screenings at Cannes and London in 2017.

He passed away in 2019 and was buried in Morocco - framed in the documentary as a protest against his treatment in both Mauritania and France.

Mauritania | 2022 | 46 min

Did you know?
We featured this as the closing film for our #AfricaMonthFilmChallenge. The documentary of his life is a reminder that African films have been winning some of the world’s top prizes for over 50 years, but it’s also uncomfortable to see how little progress has been made structurally.

As the documentary shows, his cast worked for free on his first film and he had to mortgage his house to make his last film. Even when he could find funding, he struggled to find distributors to market his films. Mauritania, the country of his birth, didn’t screen his films in cinema while he was alive. As I write this, the only film of his I can watch legally in South Africa is Soleil Ô (Oh Sun), which I’ve belatedly discovered on Mubi. It’s now next on my watchlist.

It shouldn’t be this hard to find classic African films in Africa. That’s why this Substack and the Plot Twist Africa YouTube channel exist.

Read Hondo’s 1979 manifesto, What is cinema for us?. It still strikes a nerve. There is still much work to be done.

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©️ Héctor Mediavilla

Synopsis:
The best-dressed documentary of all time, about the ‘society of elegant persons of the Congo.’

Accolades:
A Grand Clio, as well as honours at Cannes, The One Show and other major advertising awards.

The Republic of the Congo | 2014 | 5 min

Did you know?

“In life, you cannot always choose what you do, but you can always choose who
you are.”

That’s the opening line of the Guinness Sapeurs ad, which celebrates the ‘society of elegant persons of the Congo.’

The Republic of the Congo | 2014 | 1 min 40

Adland makes its money spotting trends and capitalising on them, so there’d already been growing interest in the Sapeurs.

Popularised by Congolese music icon Papa Wemba from the 1970s onwards, La Sape became the subject of two acclaimed photography books: Daniele Tamagni’s Gentlemen of Bacongo (2009) and Héctor Mediavilla’s S.A.P.E. (2013), a collaboration with Congolese author Alain Mabanckou.

Another breakthrough moment came with Losing You, a sapeur-inspired music video directed by Melina Matsoukas for Solange Knowles. Filmed in Cape Town rather than the Congo, it won Best Pop Video – International at the 2013 UK Music Video Awards and has over 35 million YouTube views.

South Africa | 2012 | 4 min

Mediavilla had already spent seven years photographing the movement when Guinness hired him to to contextualise the ad above with a five-minute documentary about the Sapeurs.

As Mediavilla reflects on his website, “This Guinness campaign was very successful and made sapeurs better-known around the world. Personally, after struggling with my internal contradictions (should I accept a commercial assignment on a topic I knew very well since years, which I had already deeply documented or not?), I was happy to help my Congolese friends to get reasonably well payed for their work and get more audience for their art.”

Of course, there is much to debate here, as Ethan Zuckerman explores, including questions of appropriation and appropriateness.

“At the start of the 20th century when the French arrived in the Congo, the myth of Parisian elegance was born among the youth of the Bakongo ethnic group, who were working for the colonisers. At that time, many considered white men to be superior, due to their sophistication and elegance,” says Mediavilla on his website. “In 1922, Grenard André Matsoua was the first Congolese man ever to come back from Paris dressed as a genuine Frenchman. His arrival caused great admiration among his fellow countrymen; he became known as the first Grand Sapeur.”

Should we glamourise a consumerist movement inspired by colonial fashion?

These are debates worth having, especially since the campaign ran primarily outside Africa (Guinness had Made of Black running on the continent instead).

Whatever the origins and appropriateness of the movement, after watching you’ll be inspired to dress better and live with more joie de vivre.

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Synopsis
Fantastic Man celebrates William Onyeabor, the Nigerian synth pioneer who released nine albums in just eight years in the 70s and 80s.

Nigeria | 2014 | 31 min

Did you know?
Onyeabor was only discovered internationally in the early 2000s when “Better Change Your Mind” was included on cult crate-digger releases like Strut’s Nigeria 70 and Luaka Bop’s World Psychedelic Classics 3: Love's A Real Thing - The Funky Fuzzy Sounds Of West Africa.

Comb & Razor blogger Uchenna Ikonne pitched the idea of a best-of compilation to Luaka Bop and then spent nine months in Nigeria trying to get Onyeabor to sign off on the rights.

The result, Who is William Onyeabor?, was Time Magazine’s fourth best album of 2013 and Pitchfork’s best reissue of the year.

"I was going to call the record This Is William Onyeabor, up until the point we realised we didn't know anything about him," Luaka Bop label head Yale Evelev told NPR's Arun Rath. "And then we changed the title to Who Is William Onyeabor?"

Despite the internet age, Onyeabor was, to quote BBC, “one of modern music’s greatest enigmas.”

Evelev had already tried calling for more context on his music. “He said to me, 'Why would I want to talk about that? I just want to talk about Jesus.' And then he hung up the phone.”

So they released his best-of compilation without the usual context, and without him doing interviews or touring.

Instead the label rounded up a super-group of his fans to perform his songs live, including Dev Hynes from Blood Orange, Alexis Taylor from Hot Chip, David Byrne of Talking Heads, Kele Okereke of Bloc Party, Luke Jenner of The Rapture, Money Mark, The Lijadu Sisters and more. Remixes followed from Hot Chip, John Talabot and more.

“Who is William Onyeabor?” is the mystery that drives Jake Sumner’s documentary for Noisey, Fantastic Man, which follows Luaka Bop’s attempts to track him down at his palace in Enugu and find out more about the mythical cult figure.

The mystery remains at the end of the film, but you’ll have a sense of wonder too, after seeing Onyeabor through the eyes of fans like Femi Kuti, Human League’s Martyn Ware, Caribou’s Dan Snaith and Blur’s Damon Albarn.

Onyeabor passed away peacefully in his sleep in 2017. A year later, Apple soundtracked its iPhone 7 commercial, Barbershop, with “Fantastic Man”, winning Golds at Cannes, The Clios and The One Show, as well as Best in Show at ADC. The spot is now part of the AICP permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

After decades in obscurity, Onyeabor’s music continues to find new audiences. “Fantastic Man” has appeared in Sex Education, Shameless and Our Flag Means Death, while “Body & Soul” features on the soundtrack of Grand Theft Auto.

Onyeabor’s music was ahead of its time but remained largely unheard outside Nigeria for decades until it found champions willing to distribute and market it to the world.

That's part of the reason this Substack exists: to help more people discover the remarkable African films that are already out there, waiting to find their audience.

And here’s the Apple ad, directed by Dougal Wilson:

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Synopsis
Lily, his claymation-inspired short, follows a lonely archivist whose life is upended by a doll that triggers his conscience.

Accolades
The inaugural AI Film Prize: $1 million from Google & the 1 Billion Followers Summit, beating 3 500 entries from around the globe.

Zoubeir ElJlassi | Tunisia | 2026 | 9 min

Did you know?
The heavyweight jury included Egyptian filmmaker Ali Ali, alongside executive creative directors from Google and YouTube, the co-founders of ElevenLabs, and Marina Mogilko from the Silicon Valley Girl podcast.

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Synopsis
Despite growing up near Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, Elias Mubobo had never seen a pangolin until he started working there as a vet. Now he helps rehabilitate rescued pangolins and educate the surrounding community about them.

Accolades
Nominated in the Conservation - Short Form category at Jackson Wild, often billed as ‘the Green Oscars.’

Augusto Bila | Mozambique | 2024 | 12 min

Did you know?
Pangolins are the only scaled mammals on earth, but their scales have made them the most trafficked mammal in the world, despite being among the cutest.

Hundreds of thousands of pangolins are illegally trafficked each year, with their scales sold for use in traditional medicine.


Pangolin Protectors came out of NEWF partnering with Gorongosa to run The African Science Film Fellowship, a year-long project with 12 African filmmakers, including Bila. The fellowship was backed by HHMI Tangled Bank Studios, who produced the Oscar-nominated documentary All That Breathes.

Pangolin Protectors was screened as part of Wild Hope, Tangled Bank’s series highlighting the change-makers restoring our wild places and sparking new hope for the future of our planet.

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Synopsis
Liverpool celebrates Mohamed Salah's nine-year career at the club, with teammates, coaches and family reflecting on the Egyptian’s record-breaking legacy.

Accolades
Over a million views in its first three days online

Egypt | 2026 | 59 min

Did you know?
Salah outscored three entire teams in his debut Premier League season, setting a then league record of 32 goals in a 38-game campaign.

He went on to become Liverpool’s all-time top scorer in the Premier League, in European competition, and in the UEFA Champions League, as well as the Liverpool player with the most Premier League assists.

He is also the first player in Premier League history to finish top for both goals and assists in multiple seasons.

So stand down George Weah, Didier Drogba and Samuel Eto’o: Salah is the king.

Even if his own daughter only rates him 7/10 as a player.

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The Oscar-nominated Ugandan political documentary, Bobi Wine: The People’s President

Poetically, the end of Showmax coincided with the start of Africa Month. I’d worked with the streamer since its first Original, Tali’s Wedding Diary in 2017, so CANAL+ shutting it down left a hole in both my wallet and my watchlist.

With time on my hands for the first time in a decade, I challenged myself to take a break from South African content and explore my continent, a film a day in May, for Africa Month.

I kept up, although some days I watched a music video or a short film, because life. I watched 31 films in 31 days, and 30 of them were on YouTube.

I watched four Oscar nominees, a double Emmy nominee, winners from Berlin, Cannes, IDFA, Sundance, and Toronto, multiple Vimeo Staff Picks and Short of the Week selects. These represented 20 African countries and more than 190 million YouTube views.

It was really fun: not much of a challenge at all because these aren’t good African films; they are good films. Period.

African content is better than ever. Funding isn’t.

African content is better than it’s ever been right now. Rwanda’s Ben’Imana, directed by Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo, just won both the FIPRESCI Award and Caméra d’Or at Cannes Film Festival, awarded to the best first feature. Meanwhile Bradley Fiomona Dembeasset won the Best Actor award in the Un Certain Regard section for Congo-Central African Republic feature Congo Boy, directed by Rafiki Fariala.

In 2025, South Africa had a record five International Emmy nominations, ranking third globally ahead of France, while Kenya received its second nomination ever in the awards’ history.

Ironically though, there are currently fewer buyers, not more. Amazon Prime Video and Paramount have publicly retreated from local content in Africa. Disney+ has gone quiet. Netflix is following the money to South Africa and, to a lesser degree, Nigeria, and increasingly towards melodrama, reality TV and true crime.

We’re still waiting to see what CANAL+ has planned now that they own MultiChoice and all its properties, beyond Cynthia Erivo playing Miriam Makeba in The Road Home for STUDIOCANAL.

And fair play: as the closure of Showmax has shown, distribution is a business and needs to balance the books. The venture capital streaming era is over.

YouTube – or nothing?

All this means YouTube is slowly becoming home to everything else.

Many of the holdouts aren’t available to stream anywhere in Africa at all for now, even the big, Oscar nominees like District 9, Io Capitano, Timbuktu and Hotel Rwanda.

Take On Becoming A Guinea Fowl, written and directed by a Zambian, starring a Zambian, and made in Zambia. It was Rotten Tomatoes’ best-reviewed film of 2025, with a 100% critics rating. It won major awards at Cannes, London and the Black Reel Awards. It signed to A24, the international distributor every filmmaker wants right now, other than Neon.

It did everything any African filmmaker can ever dream of. Is it available to stream in Africa? Of course not.

What happens when all our stories come from elsewhere?

Growing up in the Southern Suburbs of Cape Town didn’t really equip me for life in the other parts of Africa at all; like many South Africans, for much of my life, I knew more about London and New York than Lagos or Nairobi. I probably still do.

In South Africa, I often hear that there’s no market for English-speaking local content, because we can supposedly identify completely with international films and series, so we don’t need to see ourselves in local shows, the way Afrikaans or Zulu audiences do.

But when my daughter was very little, I remember she cried at Christmas, because it didn’t snow in Cape Town like it did on Peppa Pig. It was a gorgeous, hot summer day here, but she couldn’t enjoy it – because it didn’t match the only story she’d been told about what Christmas should be.

So even us umlungus need to see stories that reflect our actual lives, which, if we’re honest, have very little in common with understated English period dramas or small town life in middle America.

It’s not good for us when everything exciting we see on screen happens somewhere else. It’s not good when we normalise American operatives invading sovereign countries as the good guys. It’s not good when the stories shaping our lives are never about us. It’s not good when the gaze we look at our continent through is from colonial countries.

Beyond the algorithm

I’ve been working in the film industry for over two decades. Some of my highlights include serving as an African correspondent for Variety; a publicist for Al Jazeera English, Showmax and Triggerfish; and part of the development team on the Emmy-winning animated anthology Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire for Disney+.

When you spend as much time watching films and TV as I do, you start to see the formula, to predict what’s coming. I find this particularly when watching Hollywood content these days.

That wasn’t a problem during Africa Month. None of these films were written by an algorithm or for an algorithm. They capture life in Africa, where the stakes are high, the plot is messy, and the twists are constant.

Africa is not a country, or a genre, but these are stories I relate to deeply, even as they expand my world. Watching these films brings both the shock of the new and the warmth of recognition.

Algorithms reward consistency over once-offs, and familiarity over exploration. They steer you towards what you already know and like, narrowing your world rather than expanding it. They lead to echo chambers, not surprise.

YouTube has the audience. Just not the curation.

YouTube already reaches more people than Netflix and Spotify combined. Increasingly on TVs as well as phones. In the US, more people now watch YouTube on their TVs than Netflix. So the content and audience is there.

The curation isn’t. The best African films are still scattered across multiple channels and easy to miss.

Most of the films I watched in Africa Month have views in the millions. But Youth, a Vimeo Staff Pick short film from Egypt, still has under 3 000. Liyana, one of the most awarded African documentaries ever, has under 2 000.

Gorgeous African films are still flying under the radar, as they always have.

To counter this, I’ve started adding what I find to a YouTube channel, bringing them all together in one curated place for easy access. I’ve also started this Substack newsletter, contextualising what I watch.

#AfricaDayFilmChallenge
The reality is that a pan-African film audience doesn’t exist yet.

The only title I worked on at Showmax that topped the charts across all the key territories was The Real Housewives of Lagos. It’s hard to convince Nigerians to watch Kenyan films, or Kenyans to watch South African films, and vice versa. But being divided and conquered is another thing we all have in common.

So, even after Africa Day, I’m encouraging everyone I know to stop doomscrolling and rather explore one of your neighbouring countries you’ve never been to. From the comfort of your couch, for free on YouTube, and from a shortlist curated by a human.

First published on SinemaFocus.

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• Documentaries →
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• Music videos →
• Nature documentaries →
• Short films →

•  By country →
• By director →
• By genre →
• By runtime →
• By accolades →

Synopsis
Africa’s Cultural Landmarks is a series of 13 short documentaries that form part of an initiative to reframe The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Africa galleries.

Directed by Ethiopian-American Sosena Solomon, episodes include:
• The rock-hewn churches of Lalibela and Tigray in Ethiopia
• Great Zimbabwe, the largest man-made structure in medieval Sub-Saharan Africa
• The Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove of shrines and sculptures in southwestern Nigeria
• The Tsodilo Hills in Botswana, nicknamed ‘the Louvre of the desert’ for their 4,500 rock art paintings

Accolades
Nominated for a 2026 Webby Award

Sosena Solomon |2025 | 1m41

Sosena Solomon | Nigeria | 2025 | 12 min

Sosena Solomon | Ethiopia | 2025 | 7 min

Sosena Solomon | Ethiopia | 2025 | 9 min

Watch the full playlist here.

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Synopsis
Filmed over more than three years, Democrats charts the complex creation of Zimbabwe’s first democratic constitution.

The film follows Paul Mangwana, representing ZANU-PF, the party of Robert Mugabe, and Douglas Mwonzora, a representative of the Movement for Democratic Change (M.D.C.), run by Morgan Tsvangirai.

Accolades
• Best Documentary at Tribeca
• Two awards at CPH: Dox
• Paul Mangwana was named one of The Unforgettables by Cinema Eye

Zimbabwe | 2014 | 1 hr 40


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Synopsis
In a small courthouse in Cameroon, two women are determined to change a village.

The tough-minded state prosecutor Vera Ngassa and Court President Beatrice Ntuba are working to help women in their Muslim village find the courage to fight often difficult cases of abuse, despite pressures from their family and their community to remain silent.

Accolades
• Audience Award: IDFA, the world’s largest documentary festival
• C.I.CA.E. Award at Cannes

Cameroon | 2005 | 1 hr 48

Did you know?
Sisters in Law is co-directed by Cameroonian Florence Ayisi and festival favourite Kim Longinotto, who’s won at IDFA, the BAFTAs and Sundance with her other films.

P.S.
Don’t be put off by the workmanlike camerawork; by the time you see Beatrice scold the local men for the first time, you’ll have forgotten there’s even a camera there.

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It’s easy to see why triple Oscar nominee Cynthia Erivo (Wicked) wants to play South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba.

Miriam was the first African to win a Grammy. She sang for John F. Kennedy and Marlon Brando. She performed with Nina Simone, Harry Belafonte and Dizzy Gillespie. She married five times, including legendary South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela and activist Stokely Carmichael, who popularised the phrase “Black power.” She pleaded in the United Nations for sanctions against Apartheid.

She paid a high price for her beliefs. She had her South African citizenship revoked after appearing in an anti-Apartheid documentary, Come Back, Africa. After marrying Stokely, she was effectively cancelled by mainstream America, with the couple moving to Guinea.

By any standards, she was a remarkable woman who lived an extraordinary life.

She’s celebrated in Mika Kaurismäki’s feature documentary, Mama Africa, which won the Audience Award at Berlin.

The documentary was the idea of South African co-screenwriter and co-producer Don Edkins, who was developing it with Makeba when she died in 2008, at 76. Edkins was also behind the Why Democracy? anthology, which included the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side.

South Africa | 2011 | 1 hr 30

Next month, Cynthia Erivo will be in Cape Town to star as Miriam in The Road Home, the first STUDIOCANAL film to shoot in South Africa since the CANAL+ acquisition of MultiChoice.

The SA film industry has strong opinions about the R300 million project, which is set against the backdrop of Paul Simon’s Grammy-winning 1986 album, Graceland.

Oscar nominee Guy Pearce (The Brutalist) will play Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, who launched a boycott against Paul over the album, which he said violated the United Nation’s Cultural Boycott. SAFTA nominee Thabo Rametsi (The Silverton Siege, Kalushi) will play Miriam’s husband, Hugh Masekela.

Foreign actors playing local icons is always contentious, even when the role doesn’t require a Hollywood actress to try sing, “Igqira lendlela nguqo ngqothwane.” The budget’s also getting comments, since there’s very little other commissioning on the go currently.

One thing isn’t up for debate though: the strength of the source material - something undeniable by anyone who’s seen Mama Africa or the Emmy-winning Under African Skies.

WANT MORE MAKEBA?
Mandla Dube is launching his version later this year: Miriam Makeba, Voice of Africa.

French singer Jain made a Grammy-winning music video in South Africa to honour her:

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Synopsis
With a closing sample of Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo on colonialism, this Burna Boy music video is an angry reminder that violence doesn’t happen in a vacuum, especially in Africa.

”We are the monsters you made.”

Accolades
+14 million YouTube views

Meji Alabi | Nigeria | 2020 | 4m

Did you know?
That’s Chris Martin from Coldplay on the chorus.

Burna Boy was the first African artist to have two albums earn over one billion streams on Spotify. And the first African artist to win the BET Award for Best International Act three consecutive times. And he’s already won one Grammy from 11 nominations.

Born in England, Meji grew up between Lagos, London and Texas. He won a Best Music Video Grammy for Beyoncé’s Brown Skin Girl, co-directed with Jenn Nkiru.

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Synopsis
Photojournalist Boniface "Softie" Mwangi runs for office in a regional Kenyan election, which puts pressure on his young family and his idealism.

Accolades
• Best Feature nominee, The International Documentary Association
• Editing Award winner, Sundance: World Cinema - Documentary Category
• Boniface Mwangi was named one of the Unforgettables at CinemaEye

Sam Soko | Kenya | 2020 | 1 hr 21

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Synopsis
The animated horror follows a married man who gives in to temptation, with even worse consequences than his wife finding out.

Accolades
• Competed at Annecy, the world’s most prestigious animation festival
• Over two million views on YouTube

Peter Oti Asamoah | Ghana | 2024 | 17 min

Did you know?
I’ve been a fan of Peter Oti Asamoah since I first saw his music videos as Poka. (Start with Worlasi BoozeHigh and then Juls Gwarn, featuring Burna Boy. Those were enough to put him on my wish-list for Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire.)

Last Night is his debut short film. An eight-month passion project, he created every frame himself.


Want more?
There’s a first-look at Last Night: Chapter Two here.

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Synopsis
From desert to delta to savannah, two things never change in the Okavango: it is always beautiful and always deadly. A breathtaking nature documentary about a landscape that transforms completely every year.

Accolades
Nominated for Emmys for its cinematography and Angela Bassett's narration

Brad Bestelink | Botswana | 2018 | 1 hr 33

Did you know?
Director Brad Bestelink is a fourth-generation Motswana who founded the multi-award-winning Natural History Film Unit.

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Synopsis
In contemporary Cairo, a teenage girl is pushed to consider her own boundaries.

Accolades
• Premiered at SXSW
• Won Best Short Film Under 15m at Palm Springs
• Won the Student Short Film Showcase Award at Gotham
• Vimeo Staff Pick
• Short of the Week

Farida Zahran | Egypt | 2019 | 14 min

Did you know?
Egyptian director Farida Zahran went on to write on the Emmy-nominated comedy series Ramy.

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