Blockbusters like Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 remain the closest brush with African filmmaking for many Western audiences. Even the most ardent cinephiles and programmers mostly engage with the decades-old input of one country, Senegal, with films from trailblazer Ousmane Sembène (dubbed the “Father of African film,” and proclaimed to be the first Black African to make a film with 1963’s Borom Sarret, he was the first to garner international acclaim with 1966’s Black Girl) and Djibril Diop Mambéty (1973’s Touki Bouki) amassing the lion’s share of attention.

It’s an ingrained mindset that VIFF Centre’s Black History Month programme, African Cinema Now! actively seeks to contest. The “Now!” aspect is especially important to curators Kika Memeh and Ogheneofegor Obuwoma—both members of the Akojo Film Collective—who feel that much of contemporary African cinema “falls through the cracks and is never shown beyond one or two festivals.”

The Pirogue is a 2012 Senegalese drama film directed by Moussa Touré. Screening Feb. 12 and 16 at VIFF Centre.

Memeh sees the programme “as a very timely response to decades-worth of films that built this continental industry, because even within the continent there are many sub-industries, and African Cinema Now! sheds light on all of them as a whole.”

She continues, “Programming of African cinema in general tends to engage with films from the ‘60s and the ‘70s… but this series is about what people are creating, producing, and releasing today.” With each film, African Cinema Now! powerfully taps into the visual language of the moment, borne from the modern realities of a colonial past.

Tori and Lokita is a 2022 Belgian-French drama written, directed and produced by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Screening Feb. 26 and 27 at VIFF Centre.

In an age where many nations, like Canada, struggle to understand the place, perspective, and attitudes of immigrants, the series’ tagline and main connecting theme—”Dreaming of Elsewhere”—bustles with a timely resonance. Obuwoma notes “Many Africans all over the world are thinking about this idea of escape, of finding community and home far from where you’re born or where you’ve grown up. And we wanted to experience it in multiple ways—narratives of people leaving, people trying to leave home, or people finding themselves in places that were not originally their destination.” 

“The mechanisms of capitalism that push us towards this kind of displacement are always at work,” she adds. “It’s always making us think that there is this elsewhere that we’re moving towards that would be better. Meanwhile, capitalism still ends up framing your life anywhere you are.”

The carefully curated films of the programme capture these truths and sentiments with pure sound and vision, by emphasizing and ensuring “the visuals of the continent are on screen” and that “audiences are able to build intimate connections to these African cities.” From Mati Diop’s haunting refugee tale in Atlantics, to the tumultuous sea journey of The Pirogue, to the acclaimed, class-conscious lens of the Dardenne brothers in Tori and Lokita, African Cinema Now! is home to a feast of innovative experiences that invite us to challenge our own preconceptions and embrace the deeply felt, magisterial wonders of contemporary Africa.

African Cinema Now! Begins at VIFF Centre on Feb. 12

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