These movements have been credited by scholars as having engendered an understanding of universal sisterhood, from which emerged a flurry of conferences and media that reflected the diverse experience of women internationally.
[5] Scholar Nancy Schmidt has further noted that up to 1997, there were only recently online platforms, publications, filmographies or bibliographies that acknowledged all the feature films, documentaries, shorts and works in video, television, and digital media that African women have directed over the past several decades.
Despite the apparent defeat of colonialism, however, certain conservative notions of European civilization lingered, finding an echo in a form of village traditionalism and patriarchal authoritarianism, with Kenneth W. Harrow stating that "Whereas the protests of the 1950s and 1960s were directed against European colonialists as outsiders, or against Europe itself as an outside force, now they were directed internally against African figures of authority, – oppressive, domineering figures, including those who fled the nation and the economy as well as those who governed villages or families."
Scholars such as Sheila Petty have argued that they should not only be read as portraying an unshakeable patriarchy, but as expressions of a general loss of identity, with extreme examples of sexual politics functioning as a "process in which cultural roles can be modified through affective partnerships between men and women.
[17] She is also credited as being the first African woman film director to gain international recognition, as Kaddu Beykat won several awards among which is the FIPRESCI Prize.
[21][22] Other themes can include resilience and female independence, as in the case of Cameroon filmmaker Rosine Mbakam's Chez Jolie Coiffure.
[23] Some themes, such as education, health, childhood, or the fight for equality, are seen as traditionally feminine per Beatriz Leal Riesco, but are subjected to "the perennial authoritarian gaze, the cardinal characteristic of which is the erection of a hermetic symbolic order codifying the distance between the creator and the reality represented".
Riesco has noted that while these films portray the idealization of the feminine, they also "offer a vibrant alternative to the previous wave of cinema, largely characterized by the exaltation of the rural, of traditions and their recuperation, and of a specific kind of narration, slow and measured, based in oral conventions in which silence and speech were equally stressed.
"[11] N. Frank Ukadike has noted that African women are often "at best, sexual objects enveloped in a culture of male chauvinism; and, in the words of Ousmane Sembene, they are "still refused the right of speech.
[citation needed] The film Puk Nini has been cited by Jyoti Mystri and Antje Schuhmann as a movie that reflects on the multiple roles women are expected to perform both professionally and domestically.
[25]: 133 He in turn also questions whether European feminism would be at odds with African feminist filmmakers and see them as "inadvertently sustaining a patriarchal order and thus subverting their own goals".
Films by Sembene, Safi Faye, Sarah Maldoror and others used linear narratives in order to clearly convey the systematic exploitation of certain groups of women.
[26] Common challenges faced by African women in film include sexual harassment and sexism, as well as the balance of work and life.