If you’re unfamiliar with my musical work, OkayAfrica.com recently did a profile on me for their web TV series.

Nowadays we’re doing multiple #musicbreaks on Twitter and Facebook when the spirits move us. We figured we’d put the ten favorite ones up every Friday as our #BonusMusicBreak. First up, old school jazz man Pharoah Sanders is still doing it. Here’s a video (uploaded this week on Youtube; recorded last year) of him and his band playing […]

Short films sometimes get a bad rap — they’re considered a “learning exercise” for film school students, or worse, they’re made synonymous with boring, pretentious art house… stuff. This year’s matinee trio at NYAFF had some fun with these stereotypes. Osvalde Lewat’s ‘Sderot, Last Exit’ is an experimental documentary that follows student filmmakers as they […]

Republican party propaganda wants to paint President Barack Obama’s Kenyan family as alien to America. In this propaganda, Barack Hussein Obama Snr and the old man’s supposed “anti-colonial” and left-wing biases. In this propaganda Kenyans are reduced to anti-American zealots. Yet the strongest impression one gets from the Obama family in Branwen Okpako’s beautiful, and substantive documentary of Obama’s half sister, Auma Obama, is how familiar and American (i.e. the values Republicans proffer of hard work and guile) the Obamas are.

“Relentless” is fundamentally a film about Lagos. About how director Andy Okoarafor sees it. In Okoarafor’s rendering, Lagos is a hard, inhospitable city, where people look stressed out, always hustling. They’re always on the move. But Okoarafor also has loves this city.

It’s not hard to see why Rumbi Katedza’s first feature has been described as a Zimbabwean ‘Sex and the City’. Four high-flying twenty-something women spend a good chunk of the movie hanging out in trendy Harare bars talking sex, dating, and marriage. There’s kissing, laughing, gossiping and some great outfits. Luckily, unlike the HBO series, there’s no annoying voiceover offering throwaway insights every five scenes.

In South African director Charlie Vundla’s “How to Steal 2 Million,” Johannesburg is equated with “a jungle.” Main protagonist, middle aged Jack–fresh out of jail and looking for a job and opportunities–compares the city unfavorably to New York City, where, in contrast, people “are in it together.” Mostly shot in empty streets or in dark interiors and at night, the Johannesburg of the film lives up to this characterization. But it’s not just the main character who pines for a projected version of New York City; the film itself longs for its double, adapting and mirroring New York’s association with film noir.

From the Otelo Burning soundtrack (we still owe the soundtrack a review), here’s ‘Walk on Water’ by Reason. The film about a group of young South African surfers, set in 1989, comes with an official mixtape.

In the introduction to The World According to Bylex, Filip De Boeck and Koen Van Synghel describe the Congolese artist Pume Bylex as “not interested in the day-to-day reality of Kinshasa. [He] turns his attention to what lies beyond the horizon of the visible and the tangible (…) a world with perfection and harmony at […]