When will we stop calling it just “African cinema”?

Translated by Gaia Baraldi

There is a point where the discourse on African cinema almost always gets stuck right away, and that is not a detail. It is the name. We call it “African cinema” as if it were enough, as if the continent were enough to hold together different industries, political histories, languages, economies and visual forms. It is a convenient formula, but especially convenient for those watching from the outside. It helps the West to put order into what it knows little about. It does not really help to see.

Because the first mistake is not to think of African cinema as marginal. The first mistake is to still think of it as a single bloc. It is the same simplification that for years has lumped together profoundly diverse cinemas under generic labels, only to then, over time, learn to distinguish them. Today, no one seriously speaks of "Eastern cinema" as a sufficient category. We talk about Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Hong Kong cinema, with all the fractures, stratifications, and identities that entails. But that shift did not happen on its own. It happened because, at a certain point, the Western gaze had to refine its tools. It had to stop treating an entire area of ​​the world as an indistinct elsewhere.

Venice, too, has served as a testing ground in this regard. During Marco Müller’s tenure, the Festival significantly accelerated its outreach toward Asia. It did so not only by showcasing films but also by helping to undermine the notion of a monolithic, uniform, and interchangeable “Orient.” Through the sheer force of filmmakers, works, lineages, and differences in language and context, that indistinct mass has broken down. And what was once “Asian” has increasingly become Chinese, Korean, Japanese—specific, recognizable, and historically legible. It is hard not to think that something similar could happen with African cinema as well. Indeed: that it must happen.

Because African cinema is not an empty space to be filled. It is not a silent periphery waiting to be discovered. Rather, it is a space that for decades has been misrepresented, underseen, or only seen when it passed through the “right” filters. And this is where the point shifts radically: we are not dealing with a lack of images, but with an unequal distribution of visibility.

For a long time, in fact, what was produced in Africa had to contend not only with economic and industrial constraints, but with something deeper: the difficulty of transforming production into a stable presence. Cinema was there, but often it did not circulate. It did not consistently enter theaters, platforms, or the mainstream imagination. It remained suspended in a strange place: appreciated by those who sought it, ignored by the mainstream consumer. This is where the great Western misunderstanding arose. Because we did not see it enough, we thought it did n exist enough.

In fact, African cinema has been many things together. It was political cinema, anti-colonial, a language of symbolic reappropriation, a device of memory, a reflection of modernity, of the city, of conflict, of migration, of work, of desire. It was also, and here in the West it is harder to admit, industrial and popular cinema. That is, cinema capable of building its own markets, audiences, and production rhythms.

This is where Nollywood changes everything.

Because Nollywood is not just a success story. It is a theoretical challenge. It disproves the idea that African cinema primarly coincides with the auteur filmmaking that Europe selects, rewards, promotes and then presents to the world as a legitimate form of the image of Africa on screen. Nollywood says the opposite: there is a commercial, mass-oriented, fast-moving, and adaptable Nigerian cinema, capable of speaking to very large audiences without waiting for Western recognition. And this shifts the conversation in a fundamental way. If an industry like Nigeria produces thousands of titles a year, if it develops its own economic logic, if it builds a direct relationship with its audience, then the question is no longer whether African cinema exists. The problem is to understand why we continue to acknowledge it only when it resembles the forms already familiar to us.

From this perspective, Hollywood is not merely a more powerful industry. It is a way of seeing. It is cinema that is already presumed to be central, already accessible, already universal. And everything else, to fit into the picture, must justify itself. It must explain itself. It must be accompanied. This is where the true imbalance lies. Not simply in the number of films, but in the naturalness with which a certain imagery occupies the center and forces others to present themselves as exceptions.

Watching more African films, then, is not a matter of making a gesture of moral openness. It means unlearning a hierarchy. It means stopping thinking that universality coincides with Hollywood and that everything else is merely a regional variation—interesting, but secondary. It means recognizing that there are other ways of constructing narrative time, other relationships between image and memory, other ways of filming the body, the collective, the city, trauma, the sacred, the market, and survival.

But above all, it means stopping treating the continent as if it were already a critical category. Because perhaps the real shift today is not simply watching more African films. It is stopping calling them that—at least automatically. It is starting to truly distinguish them. Naming the countries, the languages, the industries, the traditions, the divisions. To do with Africa what the Western gaze has learned—late, but truly—to do with Asia: to accept that there is no monolithic bloc, but a constellation.

The day this happens, change will not only affect African cinema. It will be about us. Because it will mean that we will finally have stopped treating the world as a periphery of our gaze.

Mondo Internazionale APS - Riproduzione Riservata ® 2026