This 2004 South African film directed by Darrell Roodt was nominated for the foreign film award, but did not make some major cuts. Best Actress nomination: Leleti Khumalo plays Yesterday, a mother and a wife who finds out she’s HIV-positive. Best Picture nomination: the whole movie is well paced, suspenseful, and entirely moving.
This Italian-Algerian collaboration is one of the first documentary-style historical fiction films of its kind. It was nominated for three Oscars, including Gillo Pontecorvo for Best Director of 1968. Stunning, raw, and making a grand statement about colonial powers, it takes us deep into the final days of the French occupation of Algeria, showing the violent battle for independence in stark black and white. Truly a classic.
This one almost made it to the finish line! Neill Blomkamp’s allegory for apartheid South Africa told through the story of a segregated extra-terrestrial community was nominated for Best Picture of 2009. A crowd pleaser, it featured some pretty grimy-looking aliens that you actually end up rooting for. Its message of South African xenophobia penetrates deep.
You can get the whole Algerian revolution experience by watching this 1974 film by Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, recipient of the Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or. The film, follows a village peasant named Ahmed in the opening moments of the revolution for independence from France. This is a difficult film to find, but one that deserved far more prominence in the mainstream.
It’s World War II, and the French Army is forcefully recruiting Muslim soldiers from colonized Algeria to fight the Germans in Europe. The four leading men — popular film stars in France — shared a joint Best Actor prize for this film at Cannes. The forgotten, pushed-aside depiction of how the indigenes (indigenous Algerians of the French Empire) were treated by a country they fought and perished for is dragged to the surface here. It should have been seen by more people.
IMDB.com lists this as a joint South African-French-English-Canadian-American project. Let’s just call it an African film. It’s a stunning depiction of the outbreak of the Rwandan genocide as told through by real-life hero Paul Rusesebagina, the hotel owner who saved more than 1000 Tutsis from slaughter by hiding them in his hotel. Don Cheadle and Sophie Okonedo were nominated for Oscars, and both deserved to win. The film got beat out by “Million Dollar Baby” for the final prize — an equally great film. But as far as retelling a horrifying moment in world history, the boxer girl should have stepped aside.
A famous Senegalese writer/director, Ousmane Sembene (“Black Girl”) drops us into a village in Burkina Faso where female genital mutilation is practiced as religious tradition. “Moolaade,” meaning “magical protection,” comes in the form of Colle (Fatoumata Coulibaly), a courageous woman who protects young girls from their obligatory sacrifices, despite the frightening ramifications brought down by male elders. Rough and frightening because of its subject matter, but infused with the uplifting spirit of female protectors, this is the kind of film that not enough people get to know about.
So you’re saying James Earl Jones never deserved an Oscar? That’s crazy talk. Especially in this film, he showed his true chops as a South African preacher during apartheid whose son has killed a white man. He journeys to meet the father of the murdered, a supporter of the forced separation in the country played by Richard Harris. Their differences threaten to break them in unexpected ways. It’s a great film that received no nominations in 1995, but the Academy could at least give Jones an honorary Oscar!
Some call it the greatest Arabic-language film of all time. This 1958 movie was ahead of its time. Director Youssef Chahine delved right into taboo themes of adultery, homosexuality, and obsession, and received some pretty scathing reactions from the Egyptian public and decency boards. Telling the story of a crippled newspaper vendor who becomes infatuated with a lemonade vendor, it’s Hitchcockian and also vibrant and funny. No way would it have won a mainstream award back then, but it at least deserves to be revitalized and appreciated by today’s filmgoers.
In a sea of entirely relevant yet heartbreaking films, here is the most fun-loving of them all. In this early ’80s Botswana/South African madcap gem, we follow the plight of, unbelievably, a Coca-Cola bottle. Dropped from an airplane, it lands at the feet of a San tribesman. His villagers have never seen a bottle before. Hijinks ensue. This is a comedy gem that anyone can watch and not move a muscle for two hours, except to laugh.
