I’ve been getting more into classical Black and African American films lately as it has been my focus area in cinema for the last 2 years, and one thing I keep coming back to is how these filmmakers approach intimacy and sexuality specifically, the assumption that a relationship has to be exclusive to be legitimate. She’s Gotta Have It, which I recently watched thanks to a mutual’s nudge (major thanks to ripper’s archive), was an empowering and honestly delicious watch. Spike Lee’s 1986 feature-length directorial debut, in which he also stars, is probably my favorite of his work so far.

I don’t know if it’s a strange thing to say, but I love the idea at the center of it: a woman with three men pining over her, and her refusing to give in to their pressure to settle down and monogamize what she has with each of them. It’s not surprising, I suppose, to see this dynamic play out in a Western film as my assumption is that this kind of arrangement is more normalized there than it is here, where it’s usually shunned or frowned upon

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Nola Darling navigates her relationships with three men with a kind of openness and honesty that gets called brazen … “freaky,” even, by her own partners, and by a doctor she ends up seeing because everyone around her assumes something must be wrong with her. The insinuation is always the same: covert sex addiction. But to me, it read as something much simpler — a woman exercising her right to choose. Nola is figuring herself out, and she refuses to settle for anyone who doesn’t meet her needs, sexual or emotional.

That said, I don’t think the film lets her off the hook completely, and I don’t think it should. There’s something inherently selfish about keeping three men in rotation, dating and sleeping with all of them at once, and the men’s own comments make it clear they know exactly what she’s doing: treating them as parts of a whole rather than people in their own right. Mars makes her laugh and brings out her playful side. Jamie makes her feel something close to love, writes her poems. Greer is wealthy and somewhat a prude and i still don’t understand why she was with him but together, the three of them are “perfect” for her, in the sense that she can draw from whichever one meets whatever need she has in the moment.

Jamie is the only one who gets close to something exclusive which was a partial, almost proprietary claim on her toward the end. Which is what makes it so refreshing when she pushes back against it. Her body is hers, and she refuses to let her life shrink down to “Jamie’s wife.” It’s more than that, and she knows it.

This is where the film gets genuinely hard to sit with. Late on, Jamie forces himself on Nola in her own bed, a scene the film itself later has Nola describe as an “almost-rape.” That framing is confusing, and I think deliberately so. It reads less like an honest account of what happened and more like an attempt to soften it, to make it easier to live with. But nothing about the scene is ambiguous: it’s Jamie’s anger at her refusal to be his alone, translated directly into her body, at the exact moment she’s about to give herself to him fully and on her own terms. It’s the most extreme version of “it’s only okay if it’s with me” the film offers — the logical endpoint of every smaller complaint the men make about her choices throughout. Calling it “almost” anything doesn’t change what it is; if anything, it shows how deeply normalized that kind of violence can become when it’s dressed up as love or heartbreak.

And there’s a moment after this where she wavers and considers giving up the other relationships to be with him, and it’s worth sitting with what that reveals. Even her choice to go celibate afterward reads as its own kind of extreme — a sign that the pressure to conform never really left, just changed shape. It’s less “a woman shouldn’t want that much sex” and more “it’s only okay if it’s with me.” Either way, her body is still being treated as something to be managed rather than something she owns outright.

By the end, she settles for none of them and she settles into herself, into her own bed, surrounded by her own candles. Maybe she changes her mind later and opens back up to other relationships. Maybe she doesn’t and she’s fine on her own. What the film leaves us with isn’t really about which man she picks, or whether she picks anyone. It’s about a woman who isn’t asking permission to explore her own wants and she’s just doing it, without shame and without needing anyone else’s approval.

A lot of his films have protagonists who leave you rooting for them despite the many mistakes and problems they cause, because they’re simply exhibiting their humanness. The way he taps into humanity and sadness through his female characters feels like he sees me — he doesn’t even know me, but I’m just as complicated as they are, carrying just as much sadness and yearning as they do and show, and that’s one element that has always stuck out to me. I really believe the films he’s made which may not have been marketed as romance — made for some of the best romance films I’ve ever watched, in their portrayal of the phases and stages of relationships, both romantic and platonic, and how innocently odd the characters are with one another. A perfect example is Yourself and Yours (2016) and On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate (2002).

A refreshing and innocent representation of loud lovers — chaotic, and at their best when yearning — is something he explored greatly, and it feels spot on, since a lot of Korean dramas operate in that style, but he manages to balance it with a shroud of maturity and grown-upness.

Looking back at all his films, what gets me is how he’s stayed obsessed with the same things while never really making the same film twice. He’s made over thirty features now, and somewhere in the last decade his films just got smaller. Smaller casts, fewer locations, shorter runtimes — some of them barely hit an hour and a half, some don’t even hit that. In Water, from 2023, is just over an hour long. Compare that to something like Like You Know It All or Oki’s Movie, where you get a whole crowd of film-world people drinking and getting on each other’s nerves around one table. His newer films feel stripped down, like he cut everything but the bones: two or three people, a walk, a drink, a conversation that keeps circling back on itself. Less happening on screen, but somehow it hurts just as much. Maybe more.

Then there’s the drinking, which has never gone away, and I think it deserves its own mention because Hong doesn’t use alcohol the way most films do. There’s no addiction storyline, no rock bottom, no big lesson at the end of it. Soju just shows up, bottle after bottle, at almost every dinner, and honestly it works less like a plot point and more like something that gets the truth out of people. You can feel it happening in real time: the first glass is just politeness, the second is small talk, and by the third or fourth someone finally says the thing they’d been dancing around the whole scene — an old resentment, a half-admitted crush, a cruelty dressed up as honesty. He holds the camera on these dinner tables way longer than feels comfortable, so you sit through the whole slow unraveling instead of getting to look away. It’s uncomfortable but also kind of funny, because you recognise it. You’ve probably been at that table. You’ve said the thing you shouldn’t have and blamed it on the drink the next morning, same as his characters always do.

There’s also this recurring guy — a filmmaker or a writer, always stuck, wandering from meeting to meeting, drink to drink, unable or unwilling to make the thing he keeps saying he wants to make. It’d be easy to just call this self-indulgent, Hong making film after film about a man who looks a lot like him. But I think there’s something more generous going on, and it makes more sense once you know how he actually works. He famously writes each day’s scene the morning of the shoot, sometimes changing the whole story as he goes, with no finished script to hide behind. So when his characters keep stalling and cancelling meetings and talking about a project they never start, the film they’re stuck inside of is proof that he didn’t stall — he already made the thing while his characters were still just talking about making it. That gap between the fictional block and the real productivity is what makes the self-portrait funny instead of vain. These men aren’t made to look good either. They’re indecisive, a little cowardly, way too quick to romanticise themselves. Hong gets exactly how ridiculous and how sympathetic that kind of stuckness can be at the same time, and he never lets his female characters just orbit around it. It’s usually the women who see things clearly, who say what’s actually happening in a room while the men are busy performing their confusion.

This is where Kim Min-hee comes in. Working with her changed something in his films not just because of how their real-life relationship shaped the way people read movies like Right Now, Wrong Then or On the Beach at Night Alone, but tonally too. There’s a rawness to how she plays these women, a willingness to just sit in the discomfort of being confronted, being pitied, being misunderstood, and that gives his later films a different kind of closeness than the earlier ensemble comedies had. But even before her, Hong was already doing something quietly different with women on screen. On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate gives its central woman a dignity a lesser film would’ve flattened into “the one who got away.” Yourself and Yours does something even stranger, letting its heroine get recast and reinterpreted, maybe even multiplied, across the men who claim to know her, until the film becomes less about who she “really” is and more about how little any of them actually understood her in the first place. That idea — that a woman’s inner life will always be bigger than whatever story the men around her are telling about her runs under a lot of his work, whether or not it’s being sold as a love story.

I’ve spent most of this piece talking about sadness, but it wouldn’t be honest to leave out how funny these films actually are, because the humor is doing just as much work as the sadness is. Hong’s comedy hardly ever shows up as an actual joke — it shows up as recognition, the sting of watching a man talk himself into a corner, or two exes being so painfully polite to each other that the politeness itself becomes the punchline. He’s merciless with pretension, especially the self-serious kind his filmmaker and writer characters carry around, but the mockery never turns mean. It feels more like the kind of teasing you only do with someone you actually love — the joke that says I see exactly who you are and I’m staying anyway. That’s what keeps the films from tipping into full misery. The sadness is real, but it’s wrapped in a lightness that won’t let any one scene sit in self-pity for too long, and I think that’s exactly why his most heartbroken characters still feel like people I’d want to sit across from at that soju table.

That’s the quality that makes his films feel, oddly, like some of the best romance cinema I know, even the ones that were never marketed as romances at all. Korean dramas taught me to love yearning that’s loud, declarative, sweeping. Hong gives me yearning that mumbles, that changes its mind mid-sentence, that gets interrupted by a phone call or a second bottle of soju — and somehow that version feels truer. His couples are rarely sure of each other. They circle, they misread each other, they say the wrong thing at the wrong dinner. And still, somehow, tenderness survives all of it. Watching his films over these past five years has felt less like following a director’s career and more like being handed, again and again, permission to be complicated, sad, and still worth rooting for.

Over the last month and a half, I’ve found myself watching mostly queer films. It wasn’t intentional at all, and the timing with Pride Month coming up is just a total coincidence. My interest in this corner of cinema just grew naturally and a bit impulsively. After sitting with them, I wanted to curate a list of the films that really stood out to me especially in how they explore both queerness and the otherworldly. Some subtle and some coming off really strongly which can cater to everyone’s preferences.
In this list, I’ve gathered a few hidden gems ranging from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s and even a contemporary film that reject traditional storytelling. They embrace the strange, the tactile, and the supernatural to carve out radical, experimental spaces for queer thought and desire.

1. The Mark of Lilith (1986)

Directed by Bruna Fionda, Polly Gladwin, and Zack Mack-Nataf We start in the mid-80s with a brilliant, texturally rich piece of British avant-garde cinema. The Mark of Lilith subverts traditional horror by weaving together vampire mythology, white goddess archetypes, and a deeply stylized lesbian narrative. It’s a film that uses the supernatural not to terrify, but to explore identity, race, and the internalized monsters of a post-colonial world. It’s moody, intellectual, and perfectly weird.

2. Anemone Me (1990)

Directed by Suzan-Lori Parks & Bruce Hainley Anemone Me is a gorgeous, dreamlike slip of a film that thrives on atmosphere rather than conventional plot involving a blind black bodybuilder and a merman. It is otherworldly in the most literal sense, operating with a hazy, aquatic, and deeply poetic visual language. It captures a specific flavor of early-90s queer experimentalism where the boundaries between reality, fantasy, and desire are entirely blurred.

3. Odds and Ends (1993)

Directed by Michelle Parkerson Michelle Parkerson’s work is essential viewing, and Odds and Ends is a magnificent example of her visionary approach to Afro-futurism and queer sci-fi. Set in a dystopian 2096, this short, low-budget VHS experiment imagines an intergalactic war against right-wing racists, blending it beautifully with Black and Afro revolutionism. It feels like a transmission from another planet or a future we are still trying to catch up to and with this premise, i can imagine it being turned into a series or feature length film that’d do really really well.

4. Fresh Kill (1994)

Directed by Shu Lea Cheang This film is a wild, eco-cyberpunk trip i thoroughly enjoyed despite it’s feeling disjointed at different points. It follows a young lesbian couple navigating a surreal, near-future Staten Island that’s drowning in corporate greed and electronic waste. When a mysterious corporation dumps radioactive waste, the fish turn glowing neon, and things get beautifully chaotic. Shu Lea Cheang comes from a digital art background, and you can really feel it, the film is packed with strange media hacks, surreal editing, and a techno-dystopian energy that uses the “weirdness” of a toxic world to talk about survival and queer resistance.

5. I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

Directed by Jane Schoenbrun While i initially planned for this list to be classical and from pre 21st century, i feel like it’s a brilliant addition even though i have my own personal reservations about the film. I wanted to bring this lineage into the modern day and this film feels like a direct spiritual descendant of the 90s media-obsessed underground. It follows two outsiders who bond over a strange, supernatural late-night TV show that feels more real than their actual suburban lives. Led by a striking performance from Justice Smith, it’s a haunting, neon-drenched masterpiece about gender dysphoria, lost time, and the static of old television screens. It treats media as a physical place where queer and trans souls get trapped and found.

What links all of these pieces for me is how they use the “unreal” to touch on something very honest. They remind me that cinema doesn’t always have to show our world exactly as it looks on the surface and sometimes, it has to get a little weird to show us what’s actually there.

I’m still watching and planning to add more to this list as I go, but I’d love to hear your thoughts and would greatly appreciate recommendations of films in line with this.

Every year when International Women’s Day comes around, the language we hear the most is empowerment. It appears everywhere in campaigns, in captions, in corporate slogans.

But women’s liberation has never been tidy or marketable.

It is often uncomfortable. It disrupts families, traditions, and entire systems that rely on women remaining quiet or obedient. Sometimes it is loud and revolutionary, but very often it is subtle: a woman saying no, protecting another woman, refusing to accept something that has always been presented as inevitable.

Cinema has been one of the places where these acts of refusal are preserved.

Across different countries and histories, filmmakers have documented women navigating systems designed to contain them such as patriarchy, colonialism, cultural expectations, economic barriers. What fascinates me about these films is that liberation rarely arrives in dramatic, triumphant gestures. It unfolds slowly, through courage, solidarity, or simple acts of defiance.

For International Women’s Month, I wanted to share a few films that stay with me for this reason.

They are not all widely known, but each one captures a moment where women push back against the world as it is.

Jaha’s Promise (2017)

This documentary follows Gambian activist Jaha Dukureh, who survived female genital mutilation and later became one of the most prominent voices campaigning to end the practice.

What struck me most watching the film is how activism often begins from something deeply personal. Jaha is not portrayed as a distant figure of inspiration; we see the emotional weight of confronting a tradition embedded within one’s own community.

The film shows how difficult it can be to challenge something that people around you have normalized for generations.

And yet, that is often where change begins.

Women in Senegal (1995)

Directed by Egyptian filmmaker Atteyat El Abnoudy, this documentary quietly observes the lives of Senegalese women as they move through work, family, and daily life.

What I appreciate about El Abnoudy’s filmmaking is her ability to document ordinary women without turning them into symbols. The camera simply stays with them by listening, observing, allowing their presence to speak for itself.

There’s something deeply powerful about that kind of attention. It restores dignity to lives that rarely make it into official narratives or film archives.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024)

Films that deal with patriarchal violence often approach the subject with intense realism. What makes Rungano Nyoni’s work so fascinating is that she moves in the opposite direction toward dark humor, absurdity, and discomfort.

The film begins with a strange discovery: a woman finds her uncle’s body lying on an empty road. This moment leads to a surreal family gathering where unspoken tensions and buried histories begin to surface.

Underneath its strange, sometimes humorous tone, the film is about something painfully familiar i.e the culture of silence that protects abusive men within families and communities.

Borders (2017)

This film by Apolline Traoré follows four West African women traders traveling across national borders.

What should be a routine journey becomes an exhausting encounter with corruption, harassment, and the everyday sexism embedded in bureaucratic systems.

But what makes the film memorable is the relationship that develops between the women. They begin as strangers, but the shared experience of navigating these obstacles slowly creates solidarity.

Sometimes liberation begins simply with recognizing that you are not alone.

Taafe Fanga (1997)

This Malian film by Adama Drabo takes a completely different approach to gender politics through satire and folklore.

In the story, a group of women suddenly gain magical power over men after obtaining a sacred mask. The result is a reversal of gender roles that exposes the absurdity of patriarchal authority.

It’s playful and humorous, but beneath that humor is a sharp political question: what happens when the power structures we take for granted are suddenly flipped?

Moolaadé (2004)

Few filmmakers explored social justice in African cinema as consistently as Ousmane Sembène.

In Moolaadé, a woman named Collé invokes a traditional protective decree to shelter girls fleeing female genital cutting. Her act of protection quickly sparks conflict within the village.

What begins as the decision of one woman gradually becomes something larger. The women of the village begin questioning the traditions that have governed their lives for generations.

Watching the film, you realize that liberation rarely arrives as a single dramatic event. It grows slowly, through courage and collective awakening.

Why These Films Stay With Me

When I think about women’s liberation in cinema, I don’t necessarily think about stories of victory.

I think about moments where something shifts: when silence breaks, when women begin questioning the rules they inherited, when solidarity emerges between people who were never meant to challenge the system together.

Cinema cannot create liberation on its own.

But it can document these moments. It can hold onto them.

And sometimes, watching those stories is enough to remind us that the world we live in was never meant to remain unchanged.

This film explores the complexities and lifelong consequences of being pressured to conform to societal needs, traditions, and cultural expectations. Mory, a Senegalese man living in Paris with his wife and three children, struggles to hold down a stable job creating a constant, simmering tension in his household. Yet he is a poet, an undeniably talented one, but unable to build a career out of his art while carrying the weight of family responsibilities in a foreign land.

To make matters worse, he receives a letter from his stepfather in Senegal urging him to take a second wife, in line with their cultural custom that men marry multiple women after a certain age. The proposed bride is none other than Yacine, the daughter of his uncle, Madi.

From that point onward, the film delves into themes of existentialism and humanism through Mory’s narrated poetry and his constant state of inner conflict. Flashbacks of his past lover separated from him by both their fathers reveal a painful history of what could have been. The inability to defy family expectations then becomes a lasting source of regret, a reminder of how love and agency can be lost under the weight of tradition.

More often than not, we find ourselves bound by systems and beliefs we do not fully agree with, but which are upheld by our communities and environments. And So Angels Die attempts to portray this emotional and cultural entrapment. However, the film stands in stark contrast to Moussa Sene Absa’s other works, such as Madame Brouette (2002) and Tableau Ferraille (1997), where characters are more nuanced and fully developed. Here, the message struggles to fully land. By the end, we are left uncertain about the characters and their journeys, lost amid the poor and often impulsive choices they’ve made.

Sunlight [1957] directed by. Melvin Van Peebles. I took a liking to this film from first seeing a still from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) website i believe, it's a short experimental film about love and the sacrifices made for it and something about the way some of the closeups are shot and the graininess. A mutual from twitter then told me it was shot in San Francisco and it was good for more exposure to films from that part of America. The quiet stillness in some of the sequences between the leads and other shots around the church and town really drew me and can pass off as photos because the composition was so rich.

This is one of Melvin Van Peebles earliest works and is a staggering difference from his more famous and critically film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) which is a good recommendation if you’re trying to get into African American films.

(originally written on 15/07/2025)

Our final film for July at The Nomad Film Society was Mbi Na Mo (2018), a 27-minute short documentary directed by Rafiki Fariala. It follows the quiet, everyday life of a young couple expecting a child, in the aftermath of an accident.

I found myself deeply invested in the film not just because of the story it tells, but because of what it reminded me of. It took me right back to where I grew up.

I was raised in Nasarawa, a state in North Central Nigeria, in a neighbourhood where bikemen and blue-collar workers made up the rhythm of daily life. It wasn’t unusual to see young men and women, often from distant states, building new lives while carrying the weight of responsibility far too early. Watching Mbi Na Mo, set in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, I was struck by how familiar it all felt. The way people live, love, struggle, and hold each other up and it mirrored everything I’d grown up seeing. That resonance is why I, and so many others, keep searching for films like this…..stories that reflect our own.

Despite the couple’s many challenges, there’s a quiet joy that pulses through the film. They’re ecstatic about their unborn child and even have sweet, playful debates about what gender they’d prefer. Their shared moments are filled with tenderness, genuine care wrapped in the kind of childish banter that feels so natural, so intimate. It’s the kind of love that doesn’t need grand declarations, just presence. And really, that’s how it should be.

The film is raw not just in how it's shot, but in how it feels. There’s no filter, no polish. Just life, and all the compromises and sacrifices that come with it. It gently reminds us that even in the hardest conditions, life feels more bearable when you have someone beside you which is someone to support you, to hold your hand through it all.

Mbi Na Mo doesn’t try to impress, it just tells the truth. And in doing so, it leaves you with a kind of stillness that lingers long after the credits roll.

At The Nomad Film Society, our aim has always been to spotlight films that feel close to home—whether they’re made just around the corner or across the continent. Stories like Mbi Na Mo matter because they remind us of the quiet resilience woven into everyday life, and the shared humanity that connects us across borders. This is why we watch, and why we keep curating so that more people can see themselves reflected onscreen.

The film is still on The Nomad Film Society’s blogspot if you’re interested in watching. Thank you for reading.

My latest interesting watch is a short film Savannah [1989] directed and written by. Anita W. Addison which centres around a woman's internal conflict with her identity and geechee roots. A depiction of a black woman with a split personality and struggling with accepting her traditional African beliefs and spirituality. This was a rare discovery for me so again, thanks to the UCLA Archives. I’m surprised not a lot of people are aware of this film’s existence especially for people that are interested in research or learning about Geechee culture. Although much of that aspect isn’t deeply talked about but many conversations were had about it and how a lot of people that originally identify with the said culture often find themselves in a position where they may be forced to rescind or forget about that part of their person to fit into certain spaces just like the character Savannah does. Even in inter-personal relationships , it may come up as a question to partners that don’t identify or aren’t native to Geechee culture. Savannah tried to hide that part of her identity to the man whom she was seeing at the time. I like that much of the films i’ve seen so far that border on the subject of Geechee culture has at least a scene of the ‘Ring Shout’ dance for instance, A Powerful Thang [1991] directed by Zeinabu irene Davis and Compensation [1999] by the same director.

I want to share that i also took the time out to transcript subtitles in English for this film because there was none online.

The film is available to watch on Youtube although without subtitles but i uploaded a link on Gofiles with subs included.

Thank you for reading.

[originally created on 26/07/2025]

"Dôlé," [2000] the debut feature by Gabonese filmmaker Imunga Ivanga, is a warm yet quietly devastating coming-of-age story set in the streets of Libreville. It earned him the Jury Prize at Cannes Junior and the Golden Tanit at Carthage, and for good reason. The film follows a group of teenage boys mostly left to raise themselves who hustle their way through the city by shoplifting and hitting gas stations, not out of malice but out of need. Each of them carries a dream that feels just out of reach: one wants to become a rapper, another a boxer, and another dreams of buying boats and setting sail. Only Mougler seems tethered to reality and his dream is simply to care for his sick mother. When the boys hatch a plan to rob a “dôlé” stand ,a local scratchcard-style lottery promising quick riches, they find themselves at a crossroads, where childish mischief teeters into life-altering decisions. Dôlé, beyond its plot, offers a tender glimpse into the fragile aspirations of boyhood in a city where the odds are rarely in your favour.

The story felt deeply familiar, uncomfortably so. Watching Dôlé, I couldn’t help but think of how often young men across the continent are pushed toward a life of petty crime, not out of choice but out of desperation. The need to survive, to meet daily needs, and to look like you’re surviving even when you’re barely holding it together. That pressure is often amplified by peers, by the streets, by the silent rules of masculinity. What struck me even more was the boys’ decision to turn to spiritual forces to ‘juju’ to make their robbery go smoothly. There’s something haunting about seeing teenagers place their faith in the supernatural, not for healing or protection, but as a means to escape poverty. It fills you with a quiet sadness, knowing the kind of weight they carry just to try and make it out.

I also have to give credit to the cinematography. It was genuinely stunning. There were so many unexpected, offbeat angles and visual choices that stuck with me. It’s even more impressive when you realise that Imunga Ivanga came from a documentary background, with just a few short films under his belt at the time. Here are a few of my favourite shots:

This film is available on The Nomad Film Society , check out our blogspot and social medias for an array of African films we’ve screened online over the last few months.