Africa Is a Country

Dakar Modern

Dakar Modern

By
Sean Jacobs

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWbSVS0AmtA]

I’ve been wanting to post for a while now about the Digital Diaspora Family Reunion.  Primarily the work of the filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris; remember Harris film, “The Twelve Apostles of Nelson Mandela,” about his South African step father. The DDFR is described as an “interactive, multimedia project,” where New Yorkers–mostly Africans and African-Americans–showing Harris their family photos and photo albums and then telling the stories behind the photographs. Great project. In the video above, from the project, Pierre Thiam, chef and co-owner of the Senegalese restaurant Le Grand Dakar in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, not far from my house, gives Harris a look at a newly independent Senegal of the 1960s and 1970s.

Further Reading

No one should be surprised we exist

The documentary film, ‘Rolé—Histórias dos Rolezinhos’ by Afro-Brazilian filmmaker Vladimir Seixas uses sharp commentary to expose social, political, and cultural inequalities within Brazilian society.

Kenya’s stalemate

A fundamental contest between two orders is taking place in Kenya. Will its progressives seize the moment to catalyze a vision for social, economic, and political change?

More than a building

The film ‘No Place But Here’ uses VR or 360 media to immerse a viewer inside a housing occupation in Cape Town. In the process, it wants to challenge gentrification and the capitalist logic of home ownership.