Starting from the question what do contemporary African directors film, today, when they point their cameras towards the cities, this thesis undertakes an investigative journey through Johannesburg, Maputo and Harare in the films of African directors currently active in Southern Africa. Contemporary African cinemas produced in countries such as South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe are still dealing, to a greater or lesser extent, with modes of production that originated in the period of colonial domination. If, in contemporary times, South Africa has managed to create a stable film industry in the south of the African continent, countries such as Mozambique and Zimbabwe still suffer from the reflexes of the late decolonization of their modes of film production. With the fall of apartheid in South Africa (1994) and the independence of Mozambique (1975) and Zimbabwe (1980), these cities, territories which are severely marked by the segregation perpetrated by the colonizer, start to attract the attention of local filmmakers, as they become the stage of heated debates regarding racial and spatial segregation, the right to land and to housing, mobility, the relation between countryside and urban life, the clash between tradition and modernity. African cities, for a long time regarded as unfinished and interrupted projects of the colonial nightmare, started to be perceived in all of their complexity, as the epitome of African modern itself. The images of these modern, complex and unequal cities, which emerge from local contemporary cinema, disturb the dominant system of representation of the African continent, propagated by Western cinema and media. They also problematize visions that prevailed in the contexts of anti-colonial struggle and conquest of independence and they contribute to the renewal of the repertoire of African images archived by the West. The films analyzed in this thesis help to create alternate cartographies for the African cities brought to the screen. Such cinematic cities – by means of editing, sectioning, juxtaposing, approximating and eliminating spaces – create perceptions that are multiple and, at times, unexpected.