ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we leave the sprawling metropolitan areas that are spearheading Africa’s breakneck urban growth to look at the rural-urban divide that still defines much of this continent’s present realities. The chapter opens with an overview of some of the new trends, genres and cinematic languages in contemporary African cinema. From there, it moves on to discuss Ntshavheni wa Luruli’s Elelwani (2012), the first feature film ever shot in Venda. Destined for the international film festival and arthouse circuits – it was South Africa’s 2014 official submission to the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar competition – Elelwani unsettles the aesthetic canons that define how African films enter the global cultural market. To illustrate this point, I look at the aesthetic and cultural translations performed by the film’s cinematography and at how Elelwani disrupts linear conceptions of time by displacing the tradition-modernity dichotomy with an entanglement of temporalities that blurs its frame of reference.
