For African filmmakers, the Best International Feature Film category at the Oscars must be like the Olympics: no matter how many medals Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia and others get, you can be sure that China, Germany, Italy, France, the UK & Co. will get more.
Before the 2000s, African countries had won the category twice. First came Z at the 1970 ceremony. Then came Black and White in Color at the 1977 event. Z went to Algeria; Black and White went to the Ivory Coast. But both directors were Frenchmen. It would take a few decades before an African director got the prize. That was Gavin Hood from South Africa for Tsotsi at the 2006 ceremony.
Since then, radio silence. Or, well, noise that has failed to improve on the silence of the continent not winning. In 2019, Lionheart from Nigeria made a ruckus for its disqualification. But the Academy was correct: it was a film largely made in English. Since then, Nollywood, as Nigeria’s film industry is controversially known, has hustled to get in. Its closest chance probably came last year when it had the Sundance-winning picture Mami Wata submitted. But the film didn’t make the shortlist.
This year, Nollywood has sent in Mai Martaba, a film set in the northern part of the country, a region not particularly known, even within Nigeria, for the reach of its filmmaking. If it snags a spot on the shortlist, it would do wonders for an area heavily synonymous with violent crises.
The Academy will have eight other films from the continent to choose from. Some of them have absolutely no chance of making the cut — the Cameroonian submission, Kismet, being the obvious leader in this category with its barely existent production values. South Africa’s Old Righteous Blues has better production values but no real chance of getting into the shortlist either; its subject is too slight for the category and it doesn’t compensate for that with grand visuals. Egypt’s Flight 404 is a long shot but it did screen in the U.S. and Europe, so who knows?
Take My Breath from Tunisia has an intersex lead character and that might be the only reason it gets considered by the Academy. But with nothing else going for it, it stands to reason that one of the usual suspects, typically a country from Europe, will displace it from the 15-film shortlist.
That leaves Algiers from Algeria, Everybody Loves Touda from Morocco, Kenya’s Nawi, and Dahomey from Senegal. Three of those films premiered at Western festivals, Nawi being the exception. Little has been heard of Algiers on the campaign circuit, so its position is uncertain. It also premiered at the significantly less prestigious Rhode Island Film Festival, while the other festival pictures on that list went to Cannes and the Berlinale.
Nabil Ayouch’s Everybody Loves Touda is one of those films with too obvious an agenda. In this case, the agenda is society’s mistreatment of women and one woman’s struggle against it all. No problem with that, of course, but the film loses points for just how much it wants to make its point. The film isn’t exactly a Power Point presentation on female oppression, it is a neon billboard on the subject. The Academy might yet go with the obvious, but that seems highly unlikely in the same year that has produced Denmark’s The Girl With the Needle, an excellent film concerning women and the society that surrounds them. It also premiered in Cannes.
All of the above means that Africa’s hopes at the 2025 Oscars in the Best International Feature Film category might lie with Kenya’s Nawi and Dahomey. Both films combine pertinent messaging with good moviemaking. Nawi is concerned with the consequences of marrying off children as wives. Dahomey parses a rather current affair with its historical and cultural dimensions. The films are inversely related. While Nawi is a fictional tale based on a real life story, Dahomey is a true story stuffed with its filmmaker’s imagination. It would, of course, be quite the coup for Oscar watchers in Africa if both films are shortlisted and then nominated, but if there can only be one, the spot might go to Mati Diop’s documentary about the return from France to Benin of the latter’s artefacts.
A fine solidity based on fact, chronology, and imaginings dominates most of Dahomey. But in a dreamy sequence towards the end of the film, it attains a supple lyricism. And although Dahomey is compulsorily critical of colonialism and its violence, Diop does what too many black artists with Western reach refuse to do these days: she is honest about the failings of the black continent itself. Some of the young people she interrogates on the return of the artefacts want to know what their country’s leadership has done to make its citizens’ lives better. By including this bit in her film, Diop shows that the return is one part of a complex story that subsequently might indict the country to which the artefacts have been returned to.
It must be said, though, that Dahomey and Nawi both have obvious Academy drawbacks. The first is (mostly) a documentary and the latter was made with an NGO as project partner. These are not the most common kinds of projects to get Oscar attention and nominations. But then again, that’s what was said about Best Picture winners and films in any language other than English. And then Parasite happened.
Africa will be hoping for something similar.
