The Right to Speak
How Sidney Sokhona’s Films Changed African Cinema
Film Review
Series, Spectacle Theater
The Paris Review
“‘Africa was colonized, and so is its cinema,’ Sokhona wrote. His films subvert traditional documentary and ethnographic models, using a variety of overt explanatory devices—voiceover, radio segments, text, classroom scenes, interviews, speeches—to identify the way information is kept and deployed. His tongue-in-cheek didacticism gives the films a nuanced skepticism appropriate to the postcolonial moment, when the values of the colonizing West—freedom, equality—were glaringly absent in day-to-day life.”