Africa Offscreen

Africa Intern Diane is working to compile media on Sierra Leone for our Freetown office. Books are easy to come by, but perhaps you will not be surprised to learn that films are…less so.  A quick poll of the office came up with only two titles:

1. Blood Diamond (no surprise there—this is the first entry if you google “Sierra Leone films”)
2. Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars

Think about it, perhaps you’ll come up with more titles –let us know if you do!—but there’s a good chance you won’t. Films about Africa and even Western news media attention to Africa are remarkably limited considering that the second most populous continent accounts for nearly 15% of the world’s population.

In a TED talk given last year, Alisa Miller illustrated the focus of American news reporting:

True world map:

Map with country sizes skewed according to the number of news stories about them:

 Sub-Saharan Africa is almost nonexistent.

In film it is often difficult to find movies concerning Africa that don’t make a western character the protagonist. Meanwhile, many Africa countries have small fledging film industries that speak only to local audiences when they speak at all.

An exception is Nigeria, whose film industry –known as Nollywood has surpassed the US for number of films produced each year. While Nollywood has found popularity across Africa and in the Caribbean it is unlikely to draw Western fans –production values are low, acting is often over the top and the writing can be stilted—but westerners are not the target audience anyway. Many of those who enjoy Nollywood are simply happy to see version of their realities reflected on the screen.

Still it would be nice to see more representations of Africa on western screens, especially those that move beyond crisis events and depictions of conflict. Media has become so much a part of the way we learn about the world and communicate with each other across boundaries of place and culture that representation has real world consequences.

So take the challenge. Can you think of other films concerning Sierra Leone? What about other African films?