10 great East African films

Opening this year’s Film Africa, Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s Ben’Imana is an intimate, intergenerational reckoning with the aftermath of Rwanda’s 1994 Tutsi genocide. Immersing viewers in a gacaca, an open-air court rooted in indigenous judicial traditions and adapted to facilitate justice and reconciliation in the wake of the genocide, the film brings to mind Abderrahmane Sissako’s radical use of the communal courtroom in Bamako (2006) and Joshua Oppenheimer’s pained interrogations of what it means to live alongside, and forgive, those responsible for atrocities in The Act of Killing (2013) and The Look of Silence (2014). Awarded the Caméra d’Or at Cannes, it is the first film directed by a Rwandan filmmaker to be included in the festival’s official selection, which indicates the longstanding lack of international recognition and circulation afforded to cinema from East Africa and the wider continent.

The selection of films below offers a sense of the breadth of East African cinema, moving far beyond reductive mediatised images of the region limited to poverty, famine and conflict. Narratively gripping and replete with political commentary, these films critique both domestic class dynamics and external agents of imperialism, while many engage with the infrastructures and philosophies underpinning cinema itself, as exemplified by the work of experimental film collectives such as Ajabu Ajabu and the Sudanese Film Group.

The histories and geographies that inform the region open up a surprising array of influences, from Soviet film school training and the imprint of European colonialism to the growing presence of Chinese capital and culture and even the bawdy action of spaghetti westerns. Continuities across the Sahara and along the Nile complicate rigid distinctions between ‘North’ and ‘East’ Africa, while Arab and South Asian inflections seep through the Swahili coast from the Indian Ocean. These influences mingle in local film industries, acting as continuums of indigenous storytelling practices. 

The result is a varied and polyvocal output, which evades any attempt to treat East African cinema as a self-contained or singular regional film culture.

Director: Haile Gerima

Haile Gerima is one of East Africa’s most internationally recognised living filmmakers, with an expansive, peripatetic filmography. Trained in the US as a foundational figure of the LA Rebellion movement, lauded for his transatlantic drama Sankofa (1993), and a meticulous chronicler of Italian imperialism, Gerima made Harvest: 3,000 while still a student. Steeped in local culture – and shot in the aftermath of the political upheaval following the overthrow of Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia between 1930 and 1974 – this indignant and lyrical tale of class consciousness uses an Ethiopian context to address wider crossborder themes of the necessity of global, anti-capitalist revolution.

Narrated by a perceptive village fool, the film follows a chorus of peasants as they experience, speak out against, and at times become complicit with, their own exploitation. Despite its realist subject matter, the monochrome feature abounds in formal experimentation and abstraction, as well as song, with its rousing script sung just as much is spoken.

Director: Madeleine Beauséjour

Situated in the southwestern reaches of the Indian Ocean, Réunion is a minuscule tropical island neighbouring Mauritius, easily overlooked for its remoteness in a survey of regional cinema. It’s home to a creolised population descended from formerly enslaved Africans and indentured Asians, brought over to work on sugar plantations by France, of which it remains an overseas territory. 

Madeleine Beauséjour was one of the island’s very first filmmakers, whose artistic practice was heavily intertwined with the revolutionary politics of the African continent and its wider diasporas, founding the activist collective Révolution Afrique, and receiving financial backing for an ultimately unrealised Senegalese film from the Black Panthers.

Set in the capital of Saint-Denis and following a community matriarch navigating listless youth and sudden tragedies over 36 hours, Koman i lé la sours shows off the lush, surreal landscape of the island, and its syncretic local customs, superstitions and songs. As Beauséjour’s debut and the sole surviving trace of her wider filmography, it offers an understated look into the everyday textures and tensions of Réunionese life, and an arresting glimpse into her elusive practice.

Directors: Martin Mhando and Ron Mulvihill

Maangamizi: The Ancient One moves beyond the material world to interweave multiple realms: the ancestral, the oneiric, and those of psychosis and altered states of consciousness.

Dr Asira, played by Barbara O. Jones – whom some will recognise as Yellow Mary from Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) – arrives from America to begin work in a Tanzanian psychiatric ward. Deeply attuned to her patients, she is drawn to one in particular: Samehe, an orphan who appears profoundly troubled and experiences catatonia. While fending off the advances of male colleagues and acclimatising to an unfamiliar psychiatric system, Asira immerses herself in Samehe’s visions, accompanying her through processes of trauma and healing as she encounters a tormenting spirit from her past, Maangamizi. Animated by unnerving special effects, Maangamizi explores diasporic and familial fractures and reconciliations, offering powerful commentary on institutionalisation and the cultural relativism of sanity amid the pathologisation of animist beliefs.

Director: Lula Ali Ismaïl

In Djibouti’s coastal capital, three schoolgirls waver between adolescence and womanhood, navigating the rush of dating, pressure of university-entry exams and life-changing consequences. Bypassing the veneer of a superficially conservative society, Dhalinyaro confronts the many taboos which surface – such as teen pregnancy and khat dependence. Despite coming from distinctly different households and being afforded markedly different class privileges, all feel misunderstood by their families, finding solace in each other sharing hushed classroom conversations in French and Somali and daydreaming at the beach. 

Reminiscent of the Turkish drama Mustang (2015) in its conjuring of the intensity and insularity of teen sorority, Dhalinyaro is a tender film about the fragile and affirming nature of friendship, deftly portraying its embrace, ruptures and reconfigurations. The first Djiboutian film directed by a woman, it became a pandemic sleeper hit thanks to its online release by pioneering African film platform Cinewax.

Director: Wanuri Kahiu

Ziki and Kena are daughters of rival politicians in Nairobi. When they meet during election season, their chemistry is instant, if unspeakable. Kena is watchful and understated, while Ziki is whimsical and bold, exuding warmth and donning sumptuous colours which extend into the film’s dreamlike colour palette. What follows is a tender reckoning with the simultaneous shame and joy that their relationship brings them, with Rafiki vividly evoking the intense proximity of both burgeoning intimacy and a watchful, gossip-hungry community. 

At times, tentative performances mirror the naivety of the film’s protagonists and underdevelopment of queer cinema in the region. These limitations, however, do little to diminish the film’s significance. After refusing to change the ending to a less hopeful one at the request of the Kenyan Film Classification Board, Rafiki was banned in Kenya, though lauded elsewhere on the continent, receiving major prizes at Burkina Faso’s FESPACO.

Director: Suhaib Gasmelbari

Trained in East Germany and Moscow, the Sudanese Film Group was formed in 1989 by four radical filmmakers to promote independent and experimental film production and distribution in Sudan. Alongside fellow early pioneers Hussein Shariffe and Gadalla Gubara, their individual filmographies are well worth a deep-dive in their own right. In Talking About Trees, however, they form the subject, as veterans looking to open a cinema in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, where none remain open. Bureaucratic setbacks are numerous, but the incredibly charismatic foursome persevere, set on reopening the majestic open-air Cinema Revolution, with a programme of films chosen by locals.

Beyond their chosen cinema’s name, revolution haunts the documentary: the men, for all their mirth, had been political prisoners and forced to operate underground throughout regime changes, a period they revisit by swapping anecdotes and improvised reenactments, filmed on their iPhones. As Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) animates their cinema screen, the TV screen provides continuous coverage of Omar al-Bashir’s illegitimate re-election, with the film also providing a portrait of Khartoum in the lead up to both his disposal and the waves of protest and bloodshed that would disrupt the city shortly before its release. 

Director: Amil Shivji

Tug of War is a political thriller which tells the story of anticolonial sedition in British Zanzibar led by Denge, a revolutionary recently returned from the Soviet Union who is an equally enthusiastic participant in both the violent and scholarly methods of decolonisation.

Based on an eponymous book by Adam Shafi, Tug of War tells the story not just of the dissonance between oppressed Zanzibaris and the British colonial class, but other more localised fractures. Discrepancies emerge between mainland Tanganyika and the island of Zanzibar, which would not be united to form Tanzania until after independence in 1964, as do the tensions within Zanzibar’s multiethnic society. In a confluence of Indian, Arab and Black communities, Denge falls for Yasmin, an Asian runaway bride, only adding to his numerous societal transgressions. 

Luxuriating in poetic and painterly compositions, particularly around dusk in a world illuminated by candle and moonlight, director Amil Shivji evokes the surreptitious, nocturnal work of engineering a rebellion. His film also conveys the fraught atmosphere of suspicion in an environment rife with double-crossing and coerced collaboration with colonial authorities.

Directors: Darragh Amelia, Gertrude Malizana and Cece Mlay

Apostles of Cinema is a portrait of Tanzanian capital Dar es Salaam and the thriving film culture of a city in the absence of conventional cinemas. Beneath its witty and maximalist veneer, the short documentary  foregrounds complicated questions of agency, ownership, access and piracy in cinema, offering a critique and counter-method to some of the neocolonial and profit-driven logics that dictate and often limit film distribution for audiences in the Global South. 

The film paints a raucous picture of underground and informal cinemas or bandas, in which locals enjoy pirated films ranging from Bollywood and K-dramas, to Hollywood and local hits, as well as the characters who animate these spaces, like the mischievous DJ Black, who live-dubs foreign films. Conceived by Ajabu Ajabu, an alternative screen collective whose name is Kiswahili for ‘peculiar’, Apostles of Cinema provides insight into how films like those on this list might be consumed by local audiences in a region lacking more institutional cinematic infrastructure.

Director: Wakaliga Uganda

Kibuuka Omumbaale emerges from Wakaliwood, a film studio based in Wakaliga, a slumtown of  Kampala, but it carries a wide and eclectic array of influences of international genres, namely westerns and Cantonese martial arts movies, which have found popularity in the Ugandan capital and neighbouring countries.

The film takes its name from one of the earliest acts of cultural restitution in British history: the 1961 repatriation of the remains of Kibuuka Omumbaale, the war-god of the Kingdom of Buganda, from the University of Cambridge to the Uganda Museum in Kampala. When a student named Isaak comes into contact with the display of these remains during a school trip, he unexpectedly acquires Kibuuka’s supernatural powers. Chaos and misadventure ensue, compounded by the outrageous humour of the film’s opinionated off-screen narrator.

Commissioned by London’s Chisenhale Gallery after Wakaliga Uganda screenings at MoMA and the German art exhibition documenta, their work reframes what we might consider as artists’ moving image by inserting Uganda’s maximalist low-budget action movies into gallery spaces.

Director: Philip Rizk

Premiered at this year’s BFI London Film Festival, O River, We Forced You to Chew Up Their Crops both captures and becomes an act of transmission, recording the intergenerational relay of Nubian oral traditions endangered by the displacement which followed the construction of the Aswan Dam. 

As storytellers pass on eerie fables to inquisitive youngsters, their words linger across the rippling surface of the Nile, whose languid, blue-black waters belie a violent history of political turbulence. In this meditation on the effects of forced migration and ecological reconfiguration on storytelling traditions, distorted shadows and hennaed fingertips animate fading parables. Recited in both Arabic and Nubian, with subtitles employed selectively, the viewer is invited to experience and navigate the gap between listening and comprehension.

Emerging from a tale of devastating dispossession wrought by man-made flooding and voicing an embittered, foreboding invocation of revenge, this spectral documentary asks how stories are lost, recovered and transmuted when the ancestral contexts that gave birth to them are condemned to submersion and severed from their inheritors.

Film Africa runs from 23 October to 1 November 2026, including screenings and events at BFI Southbank.