African directors are at long last telling the tale of their continent

The director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun almost didn't survive the civil war in Chad. The maker of Daratt was forced to quit the country of his birth after a street altercation ended with a stray bullet landing in his thigh. He moved to France, but his return to Chad has established him as one of the leading lights of African cinema, at the head of a group of African film-makers abandoning parochial tales in favour of stories that place present-day African life in a global context.

Set in the aftermath of Chad's 40-year civil war, Daratt muses on the problems faced by the need for former enemies to live in harmony after hostilities have ended. In the wake of an amnesty in Chad, war criminals are released. But, feeling that natural justice has been obliterated, the 16-year-old Atim (Ali Barkai) decides that he must kill Nassara (Youssouf Djaoro) to avenge the murder of his father. When Atim arrives in N'djamena he locates Nassara and accepts a job working for him as an apprentice baker. But the former war criminal has remarried and a relationship develops between the two.

The storyline is inspired by real-life events. Haroun says: "After the civil war ended I knew a lot of victims who had been injured. One day I was talking to a neighbour who had been shot and taken to the street ready for execution. He told me that he was now living next to the men who had tried to kill him. The first instinct was for revenge, but we now have to go beyond this instinct and reflect to make a better future. It's why I did this film."

Haroun moved to Paris in 1982, when he was 21, and studied film but it would only be when he returned to Chad that he would begin practising it in earnest. In the late Nineties he visited Chad for the first time in a decade after he received a call at his Bordeaux home informing him that his mother had died. He made a part-fiction, part-documentary film, Bye Bye Africa, about his experience. Much of the picture is taken up with Haroun's own seemingly futile efforts to get a feature film off the ground. In one scene he enters a cinema and asks the projectionist if he ever shows African films. The answer is "rarely". Three decades after Ousmane Sembene made Black Girl (1966), universally acclaimed as the first feature film made by an African in Africa, the film industry was dead. Haroun was more determined than ever to make a film, and received French and Dutch financing to make the critically acclaimed Abouna in 2002.

Daratt, a story of forgiveness and reconciliation, was African cinema's contribution to the New Crowned Hope festival orchestrated by Peter Sellars, and picked up the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. The success of Daratt on the international film festival circuit, and its forthcoming release in the UK, is all part of a wider renaissance in African cinema. At the forefront of this sandstorm of talent are Abderrahmane Sissako (a jury member at Cannes this year), Newton I Aduaka, Cheikh Ndiaye, Khalo Matabane, Jean-Pierre Bekolo and the evergreen Sembene.

Haroun believes that there are several reasons for this success: "The quality of film-making of these talented film-makers has risen. Films such as Sissako's Waiting for Happiness, Sembene's Mooladé and Abouna were events. These are films that do not just speak about Africa, but speak about the world. In Sissako's last film, Bamako, you could see how Africa was central to world politics and that the whole world was interested in the African financial market.

"Admittedly, in the artistic realm, despite all of the talent, we remain on the periphery," Haroun adds. " But it is no coincidence that we have started to have success on the world stage as our films have become less concerned with smaller-scale tribal events. Also, there is much more interest because there is more war in Africa than the rest of the world, with fighting in Darfur and Congo.

"My concern is that the renewed interest in Africa is part of a fashion that is just one stop on the tour of a bus that goes around in a big circle. One year it stops in Argentina or Brazil, and Africa is forgotten. It has been a long time since this bus has stopped to eat African. I hope the films being recognised now are because they are strong, not part of a fashion."

Recent African cinema has struck a chord by being in touch with the zeitgeist and dealing with major contemporary issues. Mooladé dealt with female circumcision. Bamako revolved around an imaginary court case in which real lawyers put forward arguments about whether countries suffer or benefit when the World Bank and International Monetary Fund decide to distribute "financial aid". And Daratt and Aduaka's Sundance entrant Erza deal with the consequences of civil war and its aftermath just as Darfur is moving further up the news agenda.

Coinciding with this renaissance in African cinema has been an increasing number of Western-financed films being made in and about Africa. Yet whereas African film-makers are making realist political films, these productions, such as Phillip Noyce's Catch a Fire, Bille August's Goodbye Bafana and Kevin Macdonald's The Last King of Scotland have opted to deal with historical events. The two notable exceptions, Edward Zwick's Blood Diamond and Fernando Meirelles's The Constant Gardener, both opted to follow foreign, white, protagonists in Africa, possibly for commercial reasons.

But to knock these Hollywood films for seeking to appeal to an American audience and by revolving stories around white protagonists would fail to recognise the commercial reality that has been at the heart of the recent growth in African cinema. African film-makers have become more commercially savvy. Directors know they cannot compete with Hollywood in terms of budgets and technical wizardry, so they are making realist films in the tradition of African cinema but then pander to their own financiers by making movies that will strike a chord with international markets. Many of these African film-makers are being financed with money from European institutions, particularly from those in France.

Sissako argues: "There is an expedience in making films with international themes, because directors in Africa know that by appealing to these foreign markets they'll receive money to finance future projects."

What we are now seeing with films such as Daratt, and new projects from other directors, is the arrival of African film-makers as a force in world cinema; as they turn the current socio-economic interest in the continent to their own advantage and entertain international audiences in the process.

'Daratt' opens on 27 July