Third Cinema Africa

A Cinema of Decolonization ✊

Coined by Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in the late 1960s, the concept of Third Cinema proposed a radical alternative to the dominant modes of filmmaking:

• First Cinema: Hollywood. A commercial industry focused on entertainment and capitalist values.
• Second Cinema: European Art Cinema. Focused on the individual expression of an auteur director, often for a bourgeois audience.
• Third Cinema: A revolutionary cinema of the people. Its goal is not to entertain or express, but to liberate. It is a tool for political consciousness, social change, and the decolonization of the mind and the screen.

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The African Vanguard

Nowhere was the spirit of Third Cinema more powerfully embodied than in the work of the first generation of post-independence African filmmakers. Ousmane Sembène of Senegal, often called the ‘Father of African Cinema,’ is the movement’s most iconic figure. His films were a direct challenge to the colonial narratives that had dominated screens across the continent.

Key characteristics of Third Cinema in Africa include:

• Political Engagement: Films directly confront the legacy of colonialism, neocolonialism, political corruption, and the clash between tradition and modernity.
• Collective Protagonist: The hero is often not an individual, but an entire community—a village, a group of workers—struggling collectively against oppression.
• Use of Indigenous Languages: A deliberate political act to reject the languages of the colonizers and affirm local culture.
• Alternative Distribution: The ideal was to screen these films outside of commercial theaters, in community gatherings where they could be discussed and debated, turning the screening into a political event.

Films like Sembène’s Xala (1975), a sharp satire on the new African bourgeoisie, and Moolaadé (2004), a powerful indictment of female genital mutilation, are landmark examples of Third Cinema’s enduring power and influence.