Dakan

1997, Guinea, directed by Mohamed Camara

Best known as the first film from sub-Saharan Africa to confront the theme of homosexuality, Dakan is also a radical departure from the norms of African cinema on an aesthetic level. Where many directors from the continent eschew the use of close-ups - a choice often linked to the oral tradition, though the academic critic Josephine Woll has also traced this to the influence of Soviet cinema on several key African filmmakers, including particularly Ousmane Sembène - Mohamed Camara uses tightly focused shots, with, on occasion, fragments of a face filling the screen, to create an intense emotional drama, with a rich sense of the dilemmas, and dangers, faced by his lead characters.

Beyond the notable use of close-ups, Camara makes consistently interesting shot decisions - there's a particularly striking sequence of six shots contrasting Manga, one of the lead characters, with his mother, as the two begin a conversation - that underline the sense of claustrophobia (a number of the locations have the air of a huis clos), as well as the stark yet untidy choices that face young gay men (and, presumably, women) in a society like that of Guinea.

Allah Tantou

1991, Guinea/France, directed by David Achkar

Allah Tantou (which translates as 'God's Will') is an extremely personal documentary that focuses on the director's father, a prominent diplomat in the newly independent Guinea of Sékou Touré in the 1960s whose life ended in the notorious Camp Boiro prison in 1971; the prison functions both as a literal death camp and as a metaphor for Guinea's dashed hopes.

Achkar blends archival footage and family films with dramatic re-creations of his father's imprisonment, using the diaries that the elder Achkar, a meticulous writer, kept on every spare scrap of paper he could obtain. Although it's fairly brief, at just over an hour, the final twenty minutes are a little repetitive, reiterating points already eloquently made even where they successfully evoke the sense of routinized repetition of prison life, as well as the prisoner's constantly racing thoughts. One of the most fascinating aspects of the film is its use of large amounts of home movie footage, unusual for any African family of the 1960s, even at this stratum of society.