Making up a significant element of this year's Glasgow Film Festival, African Stories celebrates a diverse branch of cinema with fresh takes on genre and multiple themes. History, culture, identity, art, socio-economics, sexuality and gender are just some of the broader themes addressed in an impressive selection.

The ghost of colonialism haunts both Sarah Maldoror's Sambizanga and Djaffar Gacem's Heliopolis, set in Angola and Algeria respectively. Guadeloupean-born Maldoror's 1972 masterpiece has finally received its due with a glorious 4k restoration undertaken last year by the African Film Heritage Project. For decades, the only English-subtitled access to this pioneering classic was a 16mm print preserved in the New York Public Library. The restoration is a fitting tribute to Maldoror, who passed away in April 2020.

Clandestinely shot and initially banned in Portugal, the film was Maldoror's attempt to draw attention towards the brutality of that country's colonial regime with a piece of activist and awareness-raising filmmaking. It finds a contemporary companion piece in Gacem's sweeping, melodramatic Heliopolis (2020), in this case reminding us of France's colonial atrocities in Algeria. These films present cinema as collective memory, in particular highlighting the sides of history often marginalised or simply ignored by the West.

For decades, African cinema has powerfully told the tragic, celebratory, joyful and quotidian stories of that continent, stories which are often misrepresented, stereotyped or simply forgotten in the West. Set in a tiny corner bound to be little-known to Western audiences, Finnish-Somali director Khadar Ayderus Ahmed's 2021 Djibouti-set drama The Gravedigger's Wife is a homage to love and family, as poor gravedigger Guled struggles against all odds to afford the healthcare his critically ill wife Nasra desperately needs. The film features slow, meditative scenes, evocative mise-en-scènes and beautiful cinematography in ochre and sepia hues. Filmmaker Ahmed wanted to depict his community with dignity and compassion, a feat he accomplishes with great success.

Several of the films grapple with cultural, sexual and gender identity, most poignantly in Kenyan documentarist Pete Murimi's I Am Samuel (2020) which depicts the struggles of Samuel and Alex, a same-sex couple fighting to overcome homophobia in their private and public lives. Meanwhile, South African filmmaker Lindiwe Matshikiza's One Take Grace from last year is an astonishing experimental documentary charting the traumatic but inspirational life of domestic worker and part-time actress Mothiba Grace Bapela through first-person digital storytelling, performance, improvisation, animation, poetry, music and silence.

Thematically linked to One Take Grace is fellow South African Jenna Cato Bass' Good Madam (2021), perhaps the festival's most surprising and exciting find. A new take on Black horror that shares a genealogy with films such as Jordan Peele's Get Out and Remi Weekes' His House, Good Madam features Mavis, a domestic worker trapped in South African suburbia whose livelihood is dependent on keeping her 'good madam' happy and healthy. A haunted house, dark domesticity, superstition, ritual, servitude and racism are some of the tropes in Good Madam, a film that, like the examples mentioned above, presents socio-cultural politics as horror.

Youth culture, art and creativity feature in veteran Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch's Casablanca Beats (2021), a heartfelt improvisational film about a group of Arab youths who find meaning and drive through hip hop, guided by their initially harsh but ultimately caring teacher Anas. Riffing on a narrative familiarised through Hollywood films such as Fame, Dead Poets Society and Dangerous Minds, context here is everything, as North African politics, tensions between tradition and modernity, and the lingering effects of the Arab Spring form a powerful backdrop to this collective coming-of-age musical drama.

Creative expression and innovation reaches its zenith in Cathryne Czubek's Once Upon A Time In Uganda, a 2020 documentary which depicts the unorthodox and, at times, plain wacky filmmaking world of Isaac Nabwana, a no-budget action-flick director. Nabwana is the creator of a local filmmaking industry dubbed 'Wakaliwood', named after Wakaliga, the run-down neighbourhood in Uganda where he produces his films.

Audiences at the Glasgow Film Festival are sure to be entertained and provoked by the innovation, depth and breadth of filmmaking from Africa represented by this snapshot. The films succeed in what we expect from the best of storytelling, bringing together the universal and the specific in authentic, relatable narratives and forms.

Glasgow Film Festival runs until Sunday 13 March; see screening details for African Stories here; Lizelle Bisschoff is senior lecturer in Film Studies at Glasgow University and founder of the Africa In Motion film festival.