L'Afrique rêvée Senegal

A race is on to save Gabon’s Moukalaba-Doudou National Park and the silverback gorillas that call it home. Once, this area was protected by a thriving oil industry, but now, big companies are moving out and the logging industry is poised to move in. Ecotourism could be the only way to prevent the trees of this rainforest from coming down, but a team of conservationists needs to make the gorillas of Gabon tolerant of humans first. Follow them as they get up-close with the gorillas, study their moves, and journey to war-torn Central African Republic to learn the secrets of successful gorilla habituation.

Short Belgian documentary on volcanos in the former Belgian Congo

An Austrian director followed five successful African music and dance artists with his camera and followed their lives for a year. The artists, from villages in Ghana, Gambia and Congo, were the subjects of Africa! Africa! touring across Europe, but they have unbreakable roots to their homeland and their families. Schmiderer lovingly portrays his heroes, who tell their stories about themselves, their art and what it means to them to be African with captivating honesty. The interviews are interwoven with dance scenes and colourful vignettes set to authentic music.

How have the changing views on children been reflected in their representation in art? From Baby Jesus to the first photographic portraits, an exploration of six centuries of art history through the prism of childhood.

Peter Westerveld, artist and visionary, doesn’t want institutions to resolve the problems linked to earth’s problems. Growing up in Africa, he witnessed the advance of the desert and dedicated himself to finding solutions for the ongoing erosion and desertification of the land. The film follows Peter and the NGO working with him to realise his project; to build contour trenches that capture and store rain water under the surface and replenish the desert land.

Hereros Angola is a documentary film on the ethnic group of the same name. Originated from Bantu peoples, they maintain their millennial culture which gains new senses through the camera.

This excellent feature-length documentary - the story of the imperialist colonization of Africa - is a film about death. Its most shocking sequences derive from the captured French film archives in Algeria containing - unbelievably - masses of French-shot documentary footage of their tortures, massacres and executions of Algerians. The real death of children, passers-by, resistance fighters, one after the other, becomes unbearable. Rather than be blatant propaganda, the film convinces entirely by its visual evidence, constituting an object lesson for revolutionary cinema.

In a fascinating geopolitical drama, Danish filmmaker Mik-Meyer closely follows Ravalomanana as he attempts to return from exile in South Africa to Madagascar, under the threat of arrest and bodily harm.

Many geneticists and archaeologists have long surmised that human life began in Africa. Dr. Spencer Wells, one of a group of scientists studying the origin of human life, offers evidence and theories to support such a thesis in this PBS special. He claims that Africa was populated by only a few thousand people that some deserted their homeland in a conquest that has resulted in global domination.