West African Series
Feature filmmaking is a comparatively recent phenomenon in many of the nations of sub-Saharan Africa, with Ousmane Sembene's Black Girl (1966) credited as the watershed production. This programme illustrates how rich and diverse African cinema has become over the past thirty years. Many of Africa's leading filmmakers trained in France or Russia, and so take as a starting point techniques and forms learnt from European film and theatre, rather than from Hollywood. Ouedraogo's commanding Tilai displays a Shakespearean sense of the inextricability of personal and political realms. What is most exciting about these films, however, is what they draw from utterly non-European storytelling traditions. The mystical Brightness and the gorgeous Girl Who Sold the Sun are driven by aesthetic choices that would never even occur to most filmmakers, delivering magic moments that can allow even the most jaded moviegoer to see the world in a new way. In 2004 we screened: From Burkina Faso:
From Mali & Burkina Faso
From Senegal
The African series is made possible by the generous support of Creative New Zealand 
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At a time when films from Iran, Thailand and Brazil have become regular fixtures on the film festival circuit, African cinema remains one of the least known of the great filmmaking traditions.