Xala

A Senegalese platoon of soldiers from the French Free Army return from combat and are temporarily held in a military encampment with barbed wire fences and guard towers in the desert. Among them are charismatic Sergeant Diatta, educated in Paris and has a French wife and child, and Pays, a soldier left in a state of shock who can only communicate in guttural screams and grunts.

As World War II rages in Europe, a conflict arises between the French and the Diola-speaking tribe of Africa, prompting the village women to organize their men to sit beneath a tree to pray.

Adapted from "Vehi-Ciosane ou Blanche-Genèse," this short drama portrays a Senegalese village thrown into crisis by the pregnancy of a young girl, revealing deeper patterns of moral and social breakdown.

Eager to find a better life abroad, a Senegalese woman becomes a mere governess to a family in southern France, suffering from discrimination and marginalization.

A young unemployed man fends off accusations of laziness and makes a home for his pregnant girlfriend who has been rejected by her family.

When a woman shelters a group of girls from suffering female genital mutilation, she starts a conflict that tears her village apart.

A money order from a relative in Paris throws the life of a Senegalese family man out of order. He deals with corruption, greed, problematic family members, the locals and the changing from his traditional way of living to a more modern one.

As funeral preparations begin for Pierre Henri 'Guelwaar' Thioune, rumour spreads that his death may have been an assassination in retaliation for his radical political beliefs and constant criticism of the current regime. When the heroic Guelwaar's cadaver is stolen, his Francophile son, Barthelemy, contacts the authorities. As Detective Gora begrudgingly investigates, he discovers that Guelwaar was a complicated man guilty of his own share of sins.

A cart-taxi driver goes to the city to make a living, but out of sympathy with other poverty-stricken people, he works for free and goes hungry himself.

A forty-year-old woman refuses to give into the stigma of unwed motherhood and climbs the ladder of success in a male dominated field.

The Ceddo people try to preserve their traditional African culture against the onslaught of Islam, Christianity, and the slave trade. When King Demba War sides with the Muslims, the Ceddo kidnap his daughter, Princess Dior Yacine, to protest their forcible conversion to Islam.

The film uses a collection of post-World War II black & white photographs to portray the dockworkers of Marseilles, many of whom were of African descent. Set in and around a 1947 strike protesting weapons shipments to the French in Indochina, the images evoke the life and work of Senegalese filmmaker, Ousmane Sembène, a former dockworker, and one of the founding figures of the New African Cinema of the 1960s.