In the current issue of the Reader, Kathleen Sachs wrote an overview of this year’s African Diaspora International Film Festival, which continues through Thursday at Facets. This annual event provides as good an excuse as any to explore the great cinema produced by Africa and the people from its widespread diasporas. Of this cinema, the titles made by African American filmmakers understandably receive the most attention stateside, in part because the U.S. has such a remarkable history of films made by Black men and women. This history spans from the silent era, with works written and/or directed by (among others) onetime Chicagoan Oscar Micheaux, to the first decades of sound cinema, with actor-turned-director Spencer Williams making some of the most important films of this period, to the independent movement of the 1970s and all the way to today. I strongly encourage readers interested in the first three decades of this history to pick up Kino Lorber’s exceptional box set Pioneers of African-American Cinema, which contains a veritable trove of riches.
Touki Bouki This 1973 first feature by Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety is one of the greatest of all African films and almost certainly the most experimental. Beautifully shot and strikingly conceived, it follows the comic misadventures of a young motorcyclist and former herdsman (Magaye Niang) who gets involved in petty crimes in Dakar during an attempt to escape to Paris with the woman he loves (Mareme Niang). The title translates as “Hyena’s Voyage,” and among the things that make this film so interesting stylistically are the fantasy sequences involving the couple’s projected images of themselves in Paris and elsewhere. —Jonathan Rosenbaum
