I document African filmmakers still working whose careers began in the post-independence years and who have continued directing completed, released work in the 2020s.
Mozambican cinema is admittedly a blind spot, in part because its history is relatively short and its output has been limited since the “Kuxa Kanema” period under President Samora Machel following independence in 1975. Receiving a link to the trailer for the latest film by Mozambican cinema veteran Sol de Carvalho — “O Ancoradouro do Tempo” (“The Anchorage of Time”) — was therefore a welcome pre-Christmas surprise, which I shared on the African Film Press and Akoroko social channels last week. The film premiered on the festival circuit late 2024, opened in Portugal in June 2025, and returned home to Mozambique on December 3.
As I thought about how to present the trailer to Akoroko Premium subscribers, simply sharing the link felt insufficient given the filmmaker and the context. In that same moment, I realized that 2025, along with the years immediately preceding it, has seen completed feature filmmaking activity from other African cinema veterans, some of them pioneers. I am reluctant to describe this as a “trend.” De Carvalho is 72 years old. These are not new directors, and there isn’t any deliberate synchrony here. It’s more of a collective observation that I thought deserved a spotlight that I haven’t quite seen captured yet.
Elsewhere, late-career releases by directors like Martin Scorsese, David Cronenberg, Clint Eastwood, Pedro Almodóvar, Francis Ford Coppola, Werner Herzog, Claire Denis, Hayao Miyazaki, and more — all of whom are above 70-years-old and have directed at least one feature film in the 2020s — have triggered excitement, conversation, and broad coverage, even retrospectives, and institutional attention. I wondered what a comparable, time-bound accounting would look like for African filmmakers of a similar generation, also active in the 2020s, directing new work that has actually been released.
To be sure, many late-career African filmmakers continue shaping the field via teaching, mentoring, and institutional work. The focus here is on recent authorship of released work.
I’ll start with the aforementioned Sol de Carvalho, 72, who directed “O Ancoradouro do Tempo.” The film adapts Mia Couto’s 2020 novel “A Varanda de Frangipani,” with Couto credited as a co-writer on the screenplay. Production took place at a historic fortress on Mozambique Island, off the country’s northern coast. After a limited festival run, the film received a theatrical release in Portugal in June 2025 and premiered commercially in Maputo on December 3, 2025.
In North Africa, Algerian filmmaker Merzak Allouache, 80, premiered “Front Row” at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2024. The social comedy follows two feuding families competing for the best spot at an Algiers beach. Yousry Nasrallah (Egypt), 72, directed the television series “Menawara Be Ahlaha” in 2022, a thriller about a Deputy Public Prosecutor investigating the revenge murder of an unknown man. Nasrallah received the Cairo International Film Festival’s Golden Pyramid Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2024. Ridha Behi (Tunisia), 77, premiered “The Island of Forgiveness” at the Cairo festival in 2022, following a 60-year-old Tunisian-Italian author and professor who returns from Rome to his birthplace of Djerba to scatter his mother’s ashes, confronting past traumas from his childhood during Tunisia’s 1950s independence struggle.
In the West, Tunde Kelani (Nigeria), 77, directed “Ayinla” (2021), a musical biopic chronicling the rise of Apala musician Ayinla Omowura in 1970s Abeokuta, his personal relationships and rivalries, building toward his 1980 death. Kelani also made “Cordelia” (2021, released in 2025), an adaptation of Femi Osofisan’s novella set in Nigeria during the early 1990s under military rule. In Senegal, Moussa Sene Absa, 66, released “Xalé” in 2022, which follows 15-year-old twins Awa and Adama whose lives are upended by an assault. The film premiered at the BFI London Film Festival, served as Senegal’s submission for the Academy Awards cycle the following year, and won four African Movie Academy Awards. In Burkina Faso, Dani Kouyaté, 64, released “Katanga, la danse des scorpions” in 2025, a Mooré-language adaptation of “Macbeth.” The film won the Étalon d’or de Yennenga at FESPACO 2025, the first Burkinabé win at the festival since 1997.
Still in West Africa, Guinea-Bissau’s Sana Na N’Hada, 75, premiered “Nome” in the ACID section at Cannes in 2023, followed by an international tour. The 117-minute film combines archival footage from the 1970s with a fictional narrative about Guinea-Bissau’s independence struggle. Fellow Bissau-Guinean Flora Gomes, 76, last released a completed feature in 2012 with “La République des enfants,” but has continued directing work on a documentary about Amílcar Cabral — the revolutionary leader who led Guinea-Bissau’s independence — alongside Na N’Hada, fulfilling Cabral’s own 1960s request to document the country’s fight for liberation. As of March 2025, the project remained in editing, with completion funding raised via a crowdfunding campaign.
In the East, Haile Gerima (Ethiopia), 79, has continued work on “Black Lions, Roman Wolves: The Children of Adwa,” a multi-part documentary series about Ethiopia’s Second Italo-Ethiopian War (1935-1941) that has been in development for decades, with rough-cut versions screened publicly in recent years, alongside fund raising campaigns, and post-production ongoing as of mid-2025.
In South Africa, Ian Gabriel, 67, directed the Netflix series “Ludik” in 2022, a six-part Afrikaans crime thriller about a Pretoria furniture businessman whose secret life as a diamond smuggler forces him to transport guns across borders when his brother-in-law is kidnapped. Gabriel followed that up with “Runs in the Family,” a comedic road movie about an Indian tailor and his transgender drag queen son racing to rescue the boy’s mother from rehab, and “Death of a Whistleblower,” an investigative thriller about biological warfare funding in Africa and the Middle East, both in 2023 — the latter premiering at Toronto.
In Central Africa, animation pioneer Kibushi Ndjate Wooto, 67, directed the animated feature “Procès Mbako, Anioto Homme Léopard Mythe et Réalité” in 2023, which examines the cultural mythology of the leopard man in Congolese society.
And, finally, in the diaspora, Algerian-French filmmaker Yamina Benguigui, 70, released “Soeurs” (“Sisters”) in 2021, featuring Isabelle Adjani and Maïwenn as part of a story exploring three sisters of Algerian origin living in France. Ghanaian-British filmmaker and media artist John Akomfrah, 68, released several multimedia works during this period, including “Four Nocturnes” and “Triptych” in 2021, “Five Murmurations” in 2023, “Arcadia” in 2023 — a five-channel video installation about the transfer of plants, animals, and cultures between continents following 1492. He also built “Listening All Night to the Rain” for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2024.
Certainly, this is not an exhaustive list. But I believe it’s close to one. The list is not a measure of influence or legacy. It captures recent directing activity by a generation for whom sustained authorship has become increasingly difficult, and therefore increasingly specific.
What the Work Shows
The collective body of work produced by this veteran cohort in the 2020s suggests this is not a generation merely resting on its laurels; they are using their “late-stage” vantage point to revisit the foundational truths, myths, and promises of their respective countries — independence, revolution, and cultural identity — with a sharper, more complicated, and often more disillusioned lens than they might have used in the 1970s or 80s.
Their formal choices are a diverse, living record of African cultures. By blending archival history with adaptations of books, music, and plays, and embracing everything from animation to digital art installations, they are — unintentionally — encouraging the generations of filmmakers behind them to be flexible in their approaches, embrace genre fluidity, even if shaped by necessity and the desire to tell authentic stories in whatever form allows them to be finished and seen.
Overall, I see a shift from the revolutionary idealism of their youth to a more complex, reflective look at national history. No simple hero stories; instead, they explore moral gray areas and the complicated legacy of post-colonial nation-building. They blend personal memory with — in most cases — a patient, meditative style, creating late-career bodies of work that act as a living cultural archive; cinema as a bridge between the struggles of the past and the technology of today, making sure the continent’s history remains a living, visible part of the global conversation, honoring the past while honestly questioning the present.
Their persistence in the face of infrastructure and institutional gaps that persist decades after their debut films matters. When Sol de Carvalho’s “O Ancoradouro do Tempo” (“The Anchorage of Time”) premiered in Maputo on December 3, 2025, it represented not just one filmmaker’s achievement, but proof that African cinema’s post-independence generation continues to make films, 40 or more years later. We just need to look for them.
A small number of the films listed above — largely those released in the early 2020s — are digitally available, though often geo-locked to specific countries. Kelani’s works remain the most accessible overall, while Sene Absa’s “Xalé” and Gabriel’s “Death of a Whistleblower” appear in limited regional availability in a handful of territories. The latter’s “Ludik” was a Netflix Original series. Stream it there.
The majority — the newer work, including “O Ancoradouro do Tempo,” “Katanga, la danse des scorpions,” and, of course, Akomfrah’s multimedia installations and films that have yet to be completed and released — are not currently available to stream, rent, or buy digitally.
Watch the trailer for de Carvalho’s “O Ancoradouro do Tempo” (“The Anchorage of Time”).
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