Portal:African cinema/Selected birthdays/11



Mati Diop (b. 22 June, 1982), is a Franco-Senegalese director and actress. She comes from a family of creatives and is the niece of the filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambety. She directed her first short film, Last Night, in 2004. In 2019, her first feature film, Atlantique, was selected to compete for the  Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, where she became the first black director to win the Grand Prix. The film was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Film. In 2024, she won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale for her documentary, Dahomey, devoted to the question of the restitution by France of works of art stolen from Dahomey, present-day Benin.

Kim Engelbrecht (b. 20 June, 1980) is a South African actress mostly known for her television roles. She first gained popularity as Lolly in the popular South African soap opera Isidingo in 2011 and became known to a wider international audience for her roles on the American television series Dominion (2014–2015) and The Flash (2017–2018), and the titular character in the South African series Reyka (2021-24) in which she plays a criminal profiler. She won two South African Film and Television Awards for Best Supporting Actress in a Soap and Best Actress in a TV Drama in Isidingo and Rekya respectively. Rekya also earned her an International Emmy Awards nomination for Best Actress.

Abu Bakr Shawky (b. 3 June, 1984)  is an Egyptian-Austrian writer and director. His first feature film, Yomeddine, was selected to participate in the 2018 Cannes Film Festival and was screened in the Main Competition section where it competed for the Palme d'Or. The film, about a former leper who travels through Egypt searching for the family who abandoned him, also won the Silver Tanit Award for Best Feature Film at the Carthage Film Festival.

Connie Chiume (b. 5 June 1952) is a South African actress and filmmaker. She is known for her film roles in Black Panther (2108), Black Is King (2020) and Blessers (2019). Her television credits include roles in the South African drama series Zone 14,  Queen Sono (2020) and Gomora (2020). In 2000, she won the award for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama at the South African Film and Television Awards for her role in Zone 14.