Ethiopiques Magnetic Suite (2024)

When We Were Kings

It's 1974. Muhammad Ali is 32 and thought by many to be past his prime. George Foreman is ten years younger and the heavyweight champion of the world. Promoter Don King wants to make a name for himself and offers both fighters five million dollars apiece to fight one another, and when they accept, King has only to come up with the money. He finds a willing backer in Mobutu Sese Suko, the dictator of Zaire, and the "Rumble in the Jungle" is set, including a musical festival featuring some of America's top black performers, like James Brown and B.B. King.

Liyana

A talented group of orphaned children in Swaziland create a fictional heroine and send her on a dangerous quest.

The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey

Many geneticists and archaeologists have long surmised that human life began in Africa. Dr. Spencer Wells, one of a group of scientists studying the origin of human life, offers evidence and theories to support such a thesis in this PBS special. He claims that Africa was populated by only a few thousand people that some deserted their homeland in a conquest that has resulted in global domination.

Jane

Drawing from never-before-seen footage that has been tucked away in the National Geographic archives, director Brett Morgen tells the story of Jane Goodall, a woman whose chimpanzee research revolutionized our understanding of the natural world.

TUNAHAKI

Tunahaki is the extraordinary story of nine gifted orphans who are acrobats. We follow their journey as an American volunteer takes them from Africa to study with Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas. They end up touring the States and raising hundreds of thousands of dollars, more than enough to build a permanent home. But how have the kids' experiences in America affected them? And how will it change things back home in Tanzania? Tunahaki's heartfelt journey gives us something new to ponder as we reach across the world to help those less fortunate—is it always the right thing to do?

Mariner of the Mountains

Filmmaker Karim Aïnouz decides to take a boat, cross the Mediterranean, and embark on his first journey to Algeria. Accompanied by the memory of his mother, Iracema, and his camera, Aïnouz gives a detailed account of the journey to his father’s homeland, interweaving present, past, and future.

Running With The Beest

Plot unavailable

Mining for God

America has long been called a Christian nation. In fact, over 70% of adults in America identify themselves as Christian. Yet when filmmaker Brandon McGuire heads to the streets to ask a few clarifying questions about how Christianity is defined within our culture, he is shocked by the answers he finds. This provocative documentary takes us deep within the American mind and brings to the surface the big ideas that have influenced the way we think about ourselves and about God.

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.

Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable

This cinematic journey into the waters off East Africa chronicles the story behind artist Damien Hirst's massive exhibition of oceanic treasures.

Guerre aux images en Algérie

Plot unavailable

Sarafina!

The plot centers on students involved in the Soweto Riots, in opposition to the implementation of Afrikaans as the language of instruction in schools. The stage version presents a school uprising similar to the Soweto uprising on June 16, 1976. A narrator introduces several characters among them the school girl activist Sarafina. Things get out of control when a policeman shoots several pupils in a classroom. Nevertheless, the musical ends with a cheerful farewell show of pupils leaving school, which takes most of act two. In the movie version Sarafina feels shame at her mother's (played by Miriam Makeba in the film) acceptance of her role as domestic servant in a white household in apartheid South Africa, and inspires her peers to rise up in protest, especially after her inspirational teacher, Mary Masombuka (played by Whoopi Goldberg in the film version) is imprisoned.

Frantz Fanon, trajectoire d'un révolté

Frantz Fanon alone embodies all the issues of French colonial history. Martinican resistance fighter, he enlisted, like millions of colonial soldiers, in the Free Army out of loyalty to France and the idea of freedom that it embodies for him. A writer, he participated in the bubbling life of Saint-Germain with Césaire, Senghor and Sartre, debating tirelessly on the destiny of colonized peoples. As a doctor, he revolutionized the practice of psychiatry, seeking in the relations of domination of colonial societies the foundations of the pathologies of his patients in Blida. Activist, he brings together through his action and his history of him, the anger of peoples crushed by centuries of colonial oppression. But beyond this exceptional journey which makes sensitive the permanence of French colonialism in the Lesser Antilles at the gates of the Algerian desert, he leaves an incomparable body of work which has made him today one of the most studied French authors across the Atlantic.

Djembefola

African drummer leaves village, makes it big in the world. Great drumming!!

The Man Who Stopped the Desert

As a child in Burkina Faso, Yacouba was sent away from home to study the Qur'an, where he and his classmates were almost starving. The young boys would trek across miles of wilderness, only to fall and beg at a straw hut for meagre rations. It is from this harsh background that the young farmer became determined to develop techniques that would bring exhausted soil back into production. His efforts have outdone the work of the world's leading scientists and technological advances costing millions of pounds. They may also yet prove crucial to the future of the world's rapidly growing population and global food demands.

Tears of Africa

Plot unavailable

Prophecy - The Africa of Pasolini

Pasolini seeks in Africa the peasant and revolutionary authenticity he had sought in the Roman villages. This hope will end in a new disappointment: Africa is a reservoir of irremediable contradictions that will explode in the massacres of yesterday and today. It is an Africa that starts from the outskirts of Rome, but thousands of non-EU citizens flock to the sub-proletariat of the villages.

Iwájú: A Day Ahead

Filmed across three continents, this documentary shares the story of the founders of the Pan-African comic book company, Kugali, who made their dream a reality creating an original animation series with Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Africa's Lost Eden

In the heart of Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique, the waters of Lake Urema explode with the thrashing of a giant crocodile tail. Gorongosa was once known as the place where Noah left his ark: 1,500 square miles of lush floodplains in central Mozambique, packed with wild animals. All around, enormous buffalo, soaring fish eagles, and countless antelopes roam freely. But on closer look, something strange is going on. Fifteen years of civil war has taken a heavy toll and many species have been almost completely wiped out. All the usual top predators and prey are virtually missing, except for one - giant crocodiles and thousands of them. Discover what is being done to bring this African oasis back to its former glory, including perhaps the most ambitious restoration effort ever attempted, with elephants, hippos and scores of zebra, wildebeest, impala and buffalo, being relocated into the park.

African Cats

African Cats captures the real-life love, humor and determination of the majestic kings of the savanna. The story features Mara, an endearing lion cub who strives to grow up with her mother’s strength, spirit and wisdom; Sita, a fearless cheetah and single mother of five mischievous newborns; and Fang, a proud leader of the pride who must defend his family from a once banished lion.

A People on the March

In 1962, René Vautier, together with some Algerian friends, organised the audio-visual formation centre Ben Aknoun to encourage a "dialogue in images" between the two factions. Together with his students he made a film that shows the history of the Algerian War and of the ALN (National Liberation Army), and life during the reconstruction.

A Fountain for Susan

And once again there is another story of the immortal and ever beautiful Susan, who has to travel across the world to help her friend out of trouble. This time all the way in Africa, where her friend's wedding is already getting ready. She arrives there with him as a possible alibi for why no wedding can take place. Only things get complicated somehow after it comes out that the long-promised bride is an extremely beautiful model. And when Zuzana gets to know the more than sympathetic journalist, everything may be as it should be after all...

Statues Also Die

Commissioned by the journal Présence Africaine, this short documentary examines how African art is devalued and alienated through colonial and museum contexts. Beginning with the question of why African works are confined to ethnographic displays while Greek or Egyptian art is celebrated, the film became a landmark of anti-colonial cinema and was banned in France for eight years.

The Crimson Wing: Mystery of the Flamingos

In the remote and forgotten wilderness of Lake Natron, in northern Tanzania, one of nature's last great mysteries unfolds: the birth, life and death of a million crimson-winged flamingos.

Aybolit-66

An eccentric musical comedy based on the tale of Korney Chukovsky. In Africa, monkeys fell ill. This news was reported to Dr. Aybolit by the monkey Chichi, who escaped from the robber Barmaley. Aybolit and his assistants — Chichi and the dog Avva — are in a hurry to save the monkeys from the disease. But Barmaley and his robbers are trying to stop them. First, they capture the doctor’s ship at sea and throw Aybolit, Avva and Chichi into the water, but they swim to Africa.

A Female Cabby in Sidi Bel-Abbès

When her husband died Soumicha, mother of three, had to earn a living. She became the only woman taxi driver in Sidi Bel-Abbès, Algeria. This film accompanies Soumicha around a city where religious and political violence rages, and records her experiences in a job normally reserved for men.

Circus Baobab

French filmmaker Laurent Chevallier always wanted to make a documentary on an African circus, but there were no native circuses on the continent. So Chevallier decided to help found a circus in Guinea. 36 young people were chosen from the city of Conakry to participate in what would become Circus Baobab. A group of French circus artists were imported to train the participants for 2 years in acrobatics and trapeze. Then the group took their show on the road. This film is Chevallier's account of the troupe's inaugural tour in Guinea, from March 1 - April 11, 2000.

The Queen of Trees

In Africa, the giant fig tree and the tiny fig wasp differ in size a billion times over, but neither could exist without the other. Their extraordinary relationship is a marvel of co-evolution, a marriage which has lasted for millennia. It forms the basis of a complex web of dependency that supports entire ecosystems, providing food for thousands of creatures, from elephants, giraffes, and fruit bats, to forest hornbills, monkeys, insects, and fish.

IT IS A SOUL: A Portrait of Hailu Mergia

A short film documenting Ethiopian musician Hailu Mergia's life as the leader of the Walias Band in the 1970, his immigration to the United States and his subsequent re-emergence as a performer in 2014.

Le Village De Bamboula

"Bamboula": this word was chosen in the 1980s for a chocolate cookie well known to children at the time. In 1994, he sponsored an Ivorian village set up in the Port-Saint-Père zoological park south of Nantes, where children and adults lived in a zoo to offer their folklore as a show to visitors. This documentary film, narrated by Jean-Pascal Zadi, gives a voice to those who lived in this African safari and to those who fought for their dignity

Jane's Journey

It would be hard to name anyone who has had more of an impact in the realm of animal research and wildlife conservation than Jane Goodall, whose 45 year study of wild chimpanzees in Africa is legendary. In Jane's Journey, we travel with her across several continents, from her childhood home in England, to the Gombe National Park in Tanzania where she began her groundbreaking research and where she still returns every year to enjoy the company of the chimpanzees that made her famous. Featuring a wide range of interviews and spectacular footage from her own private collection, Jane's Journey is an inspiring portrait of the private person behind the world-famous icon.

Algeria from Above

Algeria from above is the first documentary made entirely from the sky on Algeria. Through the eye of the famous Yann Arthus-Bertrand this documentary vividly depicts this great country, and its vibrant cultural and natural treasures. From North to South and from West to East, it shows us the entirety of Algeria, lives in the large hectic coastal cities, Atlas mountains, oases of the Sahara or gentle hills of the Sahel. With a rich past that seems to have crossed all civilizations, and a territory where all natural environments amalgamate, Algeria appears here in all its diversity and its unity.