Seven films come immediately to mind. (With cut and paste description blurbs.)

1) A Panther in Africa – On October 30, 1969, Pete O’Neal, a young Black Panther in Kansas City, Missouri, was arrested for transporting a gun across state lines. One year later, O’Neal fled the charge, and for over 30 years, he has lived in Tanzania, one of the last American exiles from an era when activists considered themselves at war with the U.S. government. Today, this community organizer confronts very different challenges and finds himself living between two worlds – America and Africa, his radical past and his uncertain future.

2) Chocolat – A depiction of the relationships between colonist and colonized set in Cameroon prior to its independence as seen through the eyes of a young white girl and her black servant.  By Claire Denis.

3) Mississipi Masala – An Indian family is expelled from Uganda when Idi Amin takes power. They move to Mississippi and time passes. The Indian daughter falls in love with a black man, and the respective families have to come to terms with it.

4) Little Senegal – This beautifully photographed, touching film follows Alloune, a man who gives tours of the Senegal coastline where long ago his ancestors where imprisoned and shipped across the Atlantic in the slave trade. Through a slender doorway looking out to the wide ocean beyond, participants in Alloune’s tour are moved, saddened, and quieted by the thought of what once was. Then one day, Alloune decides that he must track the path of his own ancestors, and so he travels to the southern United States. He wanders from one former plantation to the next, asking questions, looking in libraries, and researching an extended family tree, always carrying the weight of history on his small, long, thin frame. Finally his search leads him to New York City, where he locates a young nephew, and then a female cousin who is about his same age, in her fifties. Taking a job for his cousin as a security guard at her Harlem newspaper stand, Alloune begins the difficult task of adapting to city life. The relationship between Alloune and his cousin starts off as professional, changes to family relation, and finally ends up as a love affair. However, the distance between Africa and New York, history and present, can never be escaped or forgotten.

5) Lumumba: La Mort Du Prophète – (Raoul Peck’s early film) The life and legacy of Patrice Lumumba, one of the legendary figures of modern Africa’s struggle for self-determination, is reconstructed and examined through home movies, photographs, old newsreels and interviews with Belgian journalists and Lumumba’s own daughter.

6) Rouch in Reverse – A critique of visual anthropology through the work of Jean Rouch looks at European anthropology from an African perspective. Jean Rouch and filmmaker Manthia Diawara compare their interpretations of clips from Rouch’s work.

7) Umgidi (Shadow Dancing) –  Sipho is a former political prisoner on Robben Island who decides to return to his home town to complete the Xhosa initiation ritual he began while in prison. But his younger brother, Vuyo is quite reluctant to have his own ceremony, partly because he is gay and is conflicted about adopting traditional practices. This film explores a family and a country trying to embrace both modernity and tradition