Ten years ago, there were barely two African films on screen in Aotearoa. Today, there’s an entire festival. A stubborn, vibrant Kaupapa that has refused to sit quietly in the margins.
The African Film Festival New Zealand has never hidden its intent: to educate, to provoke, to close the gap between what Africans know of themselves and what New Zealand thinks it knows. That’s the bias the mainstream still feeds us—the flattening of a continent into a single tragic headline. Here, the lens is African. The stories are plural.
Behind the scenes, festival organisers like Boubacar and his team work tirelessly, juggling work, family, and the daunting task of selecting from over 300 films, to craft a programme that fits within only so many hours in the day. This year the lineup is extraordinarily strong, with African directors gaining worldwide recognition for their work.
These films are an exercise in pure storytelling. No special effects, no explosions. Just truth on screen. And in only ten years, directors like Nigeria’s Kunle Afolayan (The Figurine) are already forging commercial international co-production links. The irreverent Viva Riva! by Djo Munga of DR Congo, financed through his own Kinshasa production company and named Best African Movie at the MTV Awards, caught the international imagination bought for distribution in 18 countries straight after its 2011 premiere at the Toronto Film Festival.
Getting international releasing outside the continent right, as well as revitalising the domestic market, are crucial to commercialising African film.
The first Nigerian film to have a UK release, Mirror Boy, grossed £40,000 in overseas income that could make a huge difference to the funding of future films.
Africa is vast, and filmmaking there is as varied as it is anywhere. Young filmmakers are emerging with a global vision that reflects contemporary realities and rapid urbanisation, internet-enabled mobile phones, satellite TV in middle-class homes. They are closer to their peers around the world, and they are asking the same questions about crowdfunding, platforms, and technologies.
This year’s festival theme is the three D’s: dream, dance, defy.
- Dream: of a society that actually listens. Of women and children safe. Of Africa seen beyond colonial footnotes. Films like Brink of Dreams (Egypt) and God’s Dream (Mali) carry that torch.
- Dance: because rhythm is not a backdrop, it’s history, protest, celebration, mourning, survival. Watch Chikka Queen (Morocco) or Rumba – The Heroines (Congo) and feel it in your bones.
- Defy: because Africa’s story is also resistance against slavery, colonisation, land theft, war, patriarchy. Films like Our Land Our Freedom (Kenya) and Captain Ibrahim Traore, the Last African Hero (Ghana) refuse to forget.
The programming cuts wide: love in Ethiopia (Megnot), women’s struggles in Zambia (On Becoming a Guinea Fowl), Apartheid remembered through song (Dr Joseph Shabalala – Ladysmith Black Mambazo), and the proxy wars reshaping Sudan and the Sahel. “We will fight with our cameras,” one FESPACO organiser told them. This festival proves it.
And it’s not only the stories but the storytellers. A new wave of African women filmmakers are stepping up, Rungano Nyoni (On Becoming a Guinea Fowl), Apolline Traore (Sira) tearing down taboos around violence, sexuality, climate, migration. Meanwhile, African animators are beginning to give kids what Western cinema never has: their own myths, their own heroes.
The roots of African cinema run deep. From Ousmane Sembène, often called the father of African film, whose Black Girl (1966) redefined postcolonial storytelling, to Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (1973) and its radical style, African directors have long pushed against imposed narratives. Today’s filmmakers inherit that legacy and expand it -global recognition now meeting local truths.
Identity threads everywhere. For diaspora youth in NZ, the festival is an anchor: belonging stitched through cinema. For Kiwis, it’s an antidote to ignorance. And for all of us, it’s a reminder that African cinema is not charity, not novelty, but part of the big picture.
Ten years in, the festival remains volunteer-run, underfunded, and impossibly ambitious. The next five-year plan aims bigger: bring filmmakers to New Zealand, send New Zealand films back to Africa, strengthen ties with tangata whenua and Pasifika, build cultural exchange that feels less like an event and more like a bridge.
At opening and closing nights, the drums beat, the Ethiopian coffee brews, the wine pours. Strangers mingle. Diaspora kids walk in with their Kiwi friends. And you realise: this is cinema at its most dangerous and most necessary
dreaming, dancing, defying.
The African Film Festival New Zealand, 18th – 28 September 2025,
The Capitol Cinema, 610 Dominion Road, Auckland.
For the full lineup: www.thecapitol.co.nz/african-film-festival-nz
— Roger Wyllie, View Mag
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