African Film Festival

September 7–October 29, 2022

After two years of pandemic-related cancellations or virtual screenings, we are proud to welcome the African Film Festival back to BAMPFA. This year, open your eyes to new horizons, new heroes, and new narratives.

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Min alesh?
The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman
Neptune Frost
Sarraounia

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Nolly Babes on Nollywood: Highway to the Grave
- Saturday, October 29 7 PM
Teco Benson
Nigeria, 2000
For their Black Life presentation, Nolly Babes—sisters Tochi and Ebele Anueyiagu—has selected Highway to the Grave, a film that deals with indigenous mythology, superstition, and feminine power.

Tochi and Ebele Anueyiagu and Ruth Gebreyesus in Prerecorded Conversation
Mrs. F
- Sunday, October 23 7 PM
Chris van der Vorm
Nigeria, Netherlands, 2020
A hard-charging theater director/activist brings her successful play on women’s empowerment into Nigeria’s largest waterside slum in this eye-opening look at exactly what it takes to make a difference. With Leonard Cortana’s short Marielle’s Legacy Will Not Die, on the murder of an Afro-Brazilian councilwoman.

Introduced by Ivy Mills
Min alesh?
- Sunday, October 2 5 PM
Amleset Muchie
Ethiopia, 2019
An indomitable young woman in Addis Ababa’s sprawling Merkato market finds that her running talent could lead her out of poverty in this inspiring, colorful film. Legendary runner Haile Gebrselassie cameos.

Introduced by Ruth Gebreyesus
The Promises
- Thursday, September 29 7 PM
Hawa Aliou N’Diaye
Mali, France, Benin, 2021
N’Diaye explores Malian tradition, myth, and the ethereal through interviews with women who—like her—claim to be possessed by enigmatic spirits known as jinn.
Sarraounia
- Thursday, September 22 7 PM
Med Hondo
Burkina Faso, Mauritania, France, 1986
A young queen leads her people against a brutal French expeditionary force in 1899 Niger in Hondo’s anti-colonialist, rough-hewn epic based on the brutal true-life history of the Voulet-Chanoine Mission.
Women’s Stories: African Short Films
- Sunday, September 18 5 PM
Women of all ages and backgrounds drive the narratives of these short films, whether in Senegal, Sudan, South Africa, or London.
The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman
- Thursday, September 15 7 PM
Rosine Mbakam
Cameroon, Belgium, 2016
“The filmmaker reinventing how African women are portrayed in movies” (NPR), Mbakam turns the camera on her own remarkable mother and her generation in this captivating documentary.
Neptune Frost
- Wednesday, September 7 7 PM
Anisia Uzeyman, Saul Williams
Rwanda, United States, 2021
BAMPFA Student Committee Pick

Replete with mind-altering visual and sonic imagery, this Afrofuturist mélange of music, poetry, and resistance is hypnotic and visionary in its depiction of a genderqueer community of hackers and techno poets. With Manu Luksch’s short Algo-Rhythm.

African Film Festival

September 7–October 29, 2022

After two years of pandemic-related cancellations or virtual screenings, we are proud to welcome the African Film Festival (AFF) back to BAMPFA. This year, open your eyes to new horizons, new heroes, and new narratives. Enter the sprawling, colorful Merkato market of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in Amleset Muchie’s Min alesh?, an inspiring tale of a young woman who turns to running to escape her circumstances. Follow a director’s own journey to understand why so many of her Malian countrywomen feel “possessed by a spirit” in Hawa Aliou N’Diaye’s The Promises, or witness a theater director’s remarkable efforts to empower the women of a Nigerian slum to not only tell their own stories, but also face down male control and domination. Sample the genderqueer, noncomformist Black Futurist realm of Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s dizzying Neptune Frost, or be reminded of a real-life anti-colonialist battle in Med...

—Jason Sanders, Film Notes Writer

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The African Film Festival National Traveling Series is organized by the African Film Festival, Inc. The BAMPFA presentation is coordinated by Film Curator Kathy Geritz and copresented by the Department of African American Studies, African Diaspora Studies Program, and the Center for African Studies at UC Berkeley. This touring series has been made possible by the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts, Communities of Color Nonprofit Stabilization Fund, and The Ed Bradley Family Foundation. Special thanks to Mahen Bonetti, director, and Dara Ojugbele, program manager, African Film Festival, for their assistance and support. The festival at BAMPFA includes additional titles. Prints are provided by the African Film Festival National Traveling Series, unless indicated otherwise.