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.

Amílcar

Poet, agricultural engineer and revolutionary Amílcar Cabral was born in Guinea-Bissau to Cape Verdean parents. After studying in Portugal, he emerged as the charismatic leader of the anti-colonial struggle against Portuguese rule. With his utopian ideas, he sparked a cultural and an armed uprising that went on to inspire other African liberation movements.

Le Goût de la savane : Herbivores et carnivores, festins croisés

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Mögöbalu, Les Maîtres des Tambours d'Afrique

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Herzschlag der Kontinente

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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.

Namibia: The Spirit of Wilderness

With more than 300 days a year, the sun dominates this country so much that it’s even shining from their flag. It’s a barren land, sometimes it’s like it’s from another planet but still familiar. It is land of contrasts and colours with wide landscapes and fascinating deserts. Influenced by various cultures during colonization and now reborn from the shadows of Apartheid in 1990, Namibia gives a beautiful collage of culture, language, art, music and food. Everyone who loves an adventure should travel to Namibia, the precious corner of our world full of incredible natural wonders. The experience of endless landscapes and an unparalleled blaze of colour make Namibia unforgettable. NAMIBIA – THE SPIRIT OF WILDERNESS invites you on a trip whose fascination will never let you go: From the Namib Desert over the breath-taking Fish River Canyon to the spectacular Etosha National Park where you will see wild elephants, antelopes, giraffes, zebras and lions.

Return of a President

In a fascinating geopolitical drama, Danish filmmaker Mik-Meyer closely follows Ravalomanana as he attempts to return from exile in South Africa to Madagascar, under the threat of arrest and bodily harm.

Liyana

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

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.

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.

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.

Africa, Blood & Beauty

This film speaks of archaic peoples, their customs and mores, in an attempt to make the last snapshots of their traditional lifestyles before they are gone for good.

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.

God Grew Tired of Us

Filmmaker Christopher Quinn observes the ordeal of three Sudanese refugees -- Jon Bul Dau, Daniel Abul Pach and Panther Bior -- as they try to come to terms with the horrors they experienced in their homeland, while adjusting to their new lives in the United States.

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.

Tears of Africa

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Suri

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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.

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.

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.

Paul Simon | Graceland: The African Concert

Singer Paul Simon and several African musicians perform a concert to benefit victims of apartheid in South Africa.

Africa Blood and Guts

A chronicle of the violence that occurred in much of the African continent throughout the 1960s. As many African countries were transitioning from colonial rule to other forms of government, violent political upheavals were frequent. Revolutions in Zanzibar and Kenya in which thousands were killed are shown, the violence not only political; there is also extensive footage of hunters and poachers slaughtering different types of wild animals.

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.

Refuge(e)

Refuge(e) traces the incredible journey of two refugees, Alpha and Zeferino. Each fled violent threats to their lives in their home countries and presented themselves at the US border asking for political asylum, only to be incarcerated in a for-profit prison for months on end without having committed any crime. Thousands more like them can't tell their stories.

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...

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

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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.