Forbidden Zone

Omar, better known as Omar the Strawberry, is an old-fashioned bandit. Forced to flee to Algeria, he makes a living out of petty crime, accompanied by his famous sidekick Roger. After decades of ruling the French criminal underworld, they must come to terms with their new life together, which until now has been one of debauchery and violence.

The Oath, a TV film produced by Algerian television in 1963 following the end of the war of independence, tells the story of young Algerians who joined the resistance after the bloody repressions of May 1945 in Constantinois by the French colonial army .

A gently humorous look at otherness and xenophobia in modern day German with this tale of a black Berlin teen named Leroy who rediscovers his roots after falling for a pretty white girl and meeting her racist family.

A man befriends a fellow criminal as the two of them begin serving their sentence on a dreadful prison island, which inspires the man to plot his escape.

A failed track coach finally finds someone who he believes has what it takes to win. The Comrades Marathon is a 90-k race in South Africa. An aging running coach, Barry, wants to field a winner; he's working with four men from a factory, but when he's fired to make way for a smooth, corporate type, he's at loose ends. Then he sees Christine, a Namibian immigrant who runs to forget her troubles. He offers to coach her and soon she's living at his house, following his diet and training regimen. But his single-mindedness gets to her: she wants a job and a place of her own. Plus, the man who replaced Barry likes her and wants her away from Barry. Can runner and coach (woman and man, African and European) sort out their complex relationship before the race? Written by

During a televised debate on the Algerian war in the early 1980s, Professor Paulet denounced the methods of Captain Caron, killed in action in 1957. The widow of the captain, Patricia, decided to file a defamation suit.

In 1911, a willful and determined man from peasant stock named Charles Saganne enlists in the military and is assigned to the Sahara Desert under the aristocratic Colonel Dubreuilh.

An American woman doctor comes to Tanzania to work at a hospital for the mentally disturbed, with her Tanzanian lover. There, she meets a sometimes catatonic patient, Samahe, who seems to be in communication with another reality. In their confrontation with their individual and collective pasts, Dr Asira and Samehe are bound by fears and half remembered images of unbearable pain. Only through the spirit of Maangamizi, can the women resume their lives with an understanding of the ancestors and their eternal presence in a world of cruelty, hatred and death. It is a story that seeks to reclaim the connection between Africa and her Diaspora, and one that dares to represent the histories of two continents as it peels away layers upon layers of pain to bring healing of the soul.

On the one hand, there’s the desert eating away at the land. The endless dry season, the lack of water. On the other there’s the threat of war. The village well has run dry. The livestock is dying. Trusting their instinct, most of the villagers leave and head south. Rahne, the only literate one, decides to head east with his three children and Mouna, his wife. A few sheep, some goats, and Chamelle, a dromedary, are their only riches. A tale of exodus, quest, hope and fatality.

Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in the sixties with this real-time portrait of a singer set adrift in the city as she awaits test results of a biopsy. A chronicle of the minutes of one woman’s life, Cléo from 5 to 7 is a spirited mix of vivid vérité and melodrama, featuring a score by Michel Legrand and cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.

Tells the life story of Danish author Karen Blixen, who at the beginning of the 20th century moved to Africa to build a new life for herself. The film is based on her 1937 autobiographical novel.

A USSR animated short adapted from one of Jomo Kenyatta's fables.

A cast of unknown performers are used in this drama about child soldiers fighting a war in an unnamed African country.

A Russian guitarist was enlisted in 1984 in the Afghan war. Imprisoned, he will meet an Afghan musician and a French journalist.

Samba (Bakary Sangare) has returned unannounced to his home village, bringing with him a suitcase full of money. Despite his protests that this is money that he earned in the city, the villagers have their doubts. In fact, he held up a gas station and unintentionally killed its attendant, and is in hiding here. Meanwhile, he has married a woman (Mariam Kaba) with a child who left her husband and built a house for her. He is building a bar with his remaining money, but he encounters a situation which makes him believe that he will be exposed to the police, and runs away, leaving a pregnant, very ill wife behind, much to the disgust of the villagers and Samba's own family.

Bab El-Oued, a popular district of Algiers, in 1989, a few months after the riots. Boualem works at night in a bakery and steals the loudspeaker that was installed on his roof and was broadcasting the Imam's word... therefore preventing him from sleeping. This blunder is taken as a pretext by the Islamists to put the district under their control...

Inspired by the true story of indomitable Kuki Gallmann, the film tells of a beautiful and inquisitive woman who had the courage to escape from her comfortable yet monotonous life in Italy to start anew in the African wilderness with her son, Emanuele, and her new husband, Paolo. Gallmann faces great danger there but eventually becomes a celebrated conservationist.

Inspector Rizzo in Napoli gets a message from a policeman from South Africa who wants to meet him. Immediately before this meeting the south African policeman is killed. Dying he shows Rizzo a picture of his little son Bodo. Rizzo travels to Johannesburg to find out what the policeman was working on and to find Bodo.

On an Algerian beach, kids splash about, sleep, squabble - and then suddenly go to war. And it’s neither Lord of the Flies nor La Guerre des boutons. In her first film, full of grace, Narimane Mari films this childish freefor- all closely, at the irregular pace of an imagination inspired by the highest form of reality, national History — actually, nothing less than the Algerian War of Independence. When their make-believe induces a general upheaval, we follow the flock of children as they stamp their feet up the stairs, invade houses, cross village squares, in a whirlwind of shouts and empty words. Time is stretched like in a dream, through a choreography of belligerent shadows or the night-time explosion of the cemetery, as so many warning signs of dangers to come.

Freedom, Nigeria's contribution to the 1957 Berlin Film Festival, was based on a play commissioned by the Moral Re-Armament Association. Based on a stage piece, the film is an unabashed paean to the MRA, demonstrating how the organization helped to check British colonialism and radical insurrection in Nigeria and bring peace to the troubled country. Subtlety is not the film's strong suit, and as a result the film seems at times to be a self-parody. Reportedly the first African production to be lensed in color, Freedom benefits from the cinematographic expertise of Scandinavia's Richard Taegstrom and Aimo Jaederman. The film was enthusiastically received at the Berlin festival, but fared less well when released internationally.