Series Site
March 6–April 6, 2025
BAMPFA is proud to partner again with our colleagues at the African Film Festival in New York to present a new edition of excellent contemporary and recently restored African cinema. This year’s version brings back one of the most critically successful titles of the past year (Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, which thrilled audiences at the Mill Valley Film Festival), and a new restoration of a classic title from the 1980s, Ousmane Sembène’s Camp de Thiaroye. Some films revisit the past, such as Osvalde Lewat’s eye-opening documentary on Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress’s armed resistance wing against the South African apartheid regime, MK: Mandela’s Secret Army; and José Miguel Ribeiro’s stunningly animated treatment of Angola’s decade-long civil war, Nayola. Others investigate Africa’s contemporary realities, like Ottis Ba’s dark Senegalese comedy of International Monetary Fund interference, A Tooth for a Tooth, or his compatriot Moussa Sene Absa’s dramatically vibrant look at a young woman’s coming of age, Xalé.
—Jason Sanders, Film Note Writer