African cinema is great, but quite hard to define sometimes. What you’ll probably notice is that the majority of great African cinema is from Francophonic African nations. With the French new wave and all that coinciding with easier and more direct migration routes, that’s just how it is.

Anyway, I’m no expert, but here’s everything I’ve seen off the top of my head:

Classic/early African Cinema:

• Touki Bouki is a surreal classic. You should definitely start with it. Iirc it’s one of ASAP Rocky and Rihanna’s favourite films, lol.

• Any film by Ousmane Sembene

• Battle Of Algiers isn’t by an African director but is essential African cinema.

• Don’t bother with any Wole Soyinka adaptation - he hated all of them, most got changed a lot by studios so their point became pointless.

Contemporary African Cinema:

• Mati Diop’s films are getting a good look at the moment if you want something more contemporary.

• Mahamet Saleh Haroun

• Phillipe Lacote

ALSO… Carribbean Cinema?

If you’re interested in African cinema, there’s a lot more Anglophonic films that mirror a similar African experience in Carribbean cinema:

• A great one is ‘The Harder They Come’ - a reggae film about a cop-killing folk hero in Jamaica.

• Any of Horace Ove’s films. He’s a great pioneer of black-british film of the Windrush era, and characters in his films often feature African British migrants too. He’s got one that’s very funny and only an hour long called…

• ‘Black Safari’, where he does an ‘explorer goes to Africa’ style documentary… about England. It’s an amazing parody, and really highlights how a camera can make a place look foreign, wild, and marauding, when it’s actually very mundane.