Countdown at Kusini

Nuits d'Afrique

The Pianist

The true story of pianist Władysław Szpilman's experiences in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. When the Jews of the city find themselves forced into a ghetto, Szpilman finds work playing in a café; and when his family is deported in 1942, he stays behind, works for a while as a laborer, and eventually goes into hiding in the ruins of the war-torn city.

The African Queen

At the start of the First World War, in the middle of Africa’s nowhere, a gin soaked riverboat captain is persuaded by a strong-willed missionary to go down river and face-off a German warship.

White Hunter, Black Heart

Renowned filmmaker John Wilson travels to Africa to direct a new movie, but constantly leaves to hunt elephants and other game, to the dismay of his cast and crew. He eventually becomes obsessed with hunting down and killing one specific elephant.

Rising Moon

The chief priest in the village dies and the village is in turmoil. Onyeka is constantly being ridiculed and taunted about her condition, the family members bring Maureen in as the new wife. A priest in the village, and Onyeka goes to the Catholic church to pray to God to give her a child.

The Draughtsmen Clash

This film tells the story of the president of a fictitious African nation who spends a sleepless night playing checkers with a pot-smoking vagabond who claims to be the all-round champion. However, the rules of the game entail the opponents howling vulgar and foul obscenities at one another. The champion proceeds to insult, and trounce, the President. His reward, and his fate, will not surprise anyone.

Mountains of the Moon

The story of Captain Richard Francis Burton's and Lt. John Hanning Speke's expedition to find the source of the Nile river in the name of Queen Victoria's British Empire.

Desert Flower

The autobiography of a Somalian nomad who was sold in marriage at 13, fled from Africa a while later to become finally an American supermodel and is now at the age of 38, the UN spokeswoman against female genital mutilation.

Beasts of No Nation

Based on the experiences of Agu, a child fighting in the civil war of a West African country. Follows Agu's journey as he's forced to join a group of soldiers. While he fears his commander and many of the men around him, his fledgling childhood has been brutally shattered by the war raging through his country, and he is at first torn between conflicting revulsion and fascination.

Secret Violence

An Italian in East Africa having an affair with a coloured woman realises that his treatment of her is as tyrannical as more overt superior colonialist dogma. Based on a novel by Enrico Emmanuele.

Dawn of the Damned

This excellent feature-length documentary - the story of the imperialist colonization of Africa - is a film about death. Its most shocking sequences derive from the captured French film archives in Algeria containing - unbelievably - masses of French-shot documentary footage of their tortures, massacres and executions of Algerians. The real death of children, passers-by, resistance fighters, one after the other, becomes unbearable. Rather than be blatant propaganda, the film convinces entirely by its visual evidence, constituting an object lesson for revolutionary cinema.

Tajouj

Beginning of the 20th century in the east of Sudan. Tajouj is the beautiful cousin of a young tribesman who falls in love with her and proclaims his love out loud in a song. However, the traditions of his tribe forbid such love, and his uncle refuses his request to marry Tajouj. But after the young man leaves the village and declares his remorse, the marriage is finally allowed after all. In the meantime, however, another man has expressed interest in Tajouj. A story full of jealousy ensues, which ends in tragedy.

The Cauliflower of Destiny

Stifled Ania, trapped in a grimy grocery store, is suffocating under her mother’s toxic control. Salvation arrives via a discarded cauliflower that, unsettlingly, starts talking. At first a witty mentor, the vegetable’s advice soon sours into a grotesque push for revenge. As her rebellion escalates from petty pranks to radical acts, Ania must decide: is this edible oracle her savior or a deranged voice of self destruction? A darkly comic journey where freedom tastes like rot.

In the Name of Christ

A West African pig farmer has a religious vision, wherein he is told that he'll be Magloire the First, a prophet of Christ. He then sets out to rid his local villagers of superstition and instead save them for Jesus.

The Big Red One

A veteran sergeant of World War I leads a squad in World War II, always in the company of the survivor Pvt. Griff, the writer Pvt. Zab, the Sicilian Pvt. Vinci and Pvt. Johnson, in Vichy French Africa, Sicily, D-Day at Omaha Beach, Belgium and France, and ending in a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia where they face the true horror of war.

Gito the Ungrateful

Back home in Bujumbura with a Parisian diploma in his pocket and expecting to walk into a civil service job, Gito finds himself both unemployed and caught between two women: his current French girlfriend Christine and his local old flame Flora.

Sometimes in April

Two brothers are divided by marriage and fate during the 100 horrifying days of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

N'Diangane

This film presents a harsh critique of the Koranic teaching through the tragic story of a small talibé, student of a beggar.

Another Sky

After a puritan youth, a young English woman discovers her sensuality in North-Africa.

Gravity

Asked by his girlfriend about the essence of his love for her, a young man remembers a dream he once had about the African jungle, in which the forces of nature seemed to lead a life of their own.