JOHANNESBURG There's Hollywood, and Bollywood, and Nollywood (Nigeria's nascent film industry), so perhaps it was only a matter of time before someone coined Sollywood. This is the name of what aspires to be a new movement in film-making in South Africa.

The Sollywood website sets out an agenda that includes making films on topics important to the South African community, making movies that end on a positive note for the community and the African people and, in capital letters, “MAKE AFRICANS FEEL GOOD ABOUT BEING AFRICANS”.

Last week I caught the first Sollywood offering, Ingxoxo The Negotiation - a romantic comedy but not as Richard Curtis would know it. The plot turns on the African custom of lobola, in which the family of a bride is compensated for her loss with a payment, traditionally cattle.

In this case, the groom's Zulu family makes stumbling efforts to offer cows to a BaPedi family, who are unimpressed by their social clumsiness and bragging about ancestral heroics. This is in turn unhinges the groom and threatens to turn him against his fiancée.

For an outsider, it was an arresting insight into tribal differences of social etiquette within South Africa. I found it less enthralling as a piece of cinema, made in three weeks for the equivalent of GBP150,000 with acting that was not of uniform quality.

After a screening at Johannesburg's Sci-Bono Discovery Centre, the film's producers declared the need to make films that present South Africa in a positive way, much as Hollywood presents America, and prove that many of the world's negative stereotypes are wrong. There was enthusiastic applause in the room.

Certainly, there are plenty of Hollywood films that end up waving the Stars and Stripes, more or less subtly. But my favourites, such as Citizen Kane, The Godfather and Taxi Driver, are rather more subversive. If they happen to sell a desirable image of America, it's because for much of the world America is a desirable place.

I suspect most films that self-consciously set out to promote a country, or any other product, are ultimately doomed to obscurity. The movies that excite and intrigue me most about South Africa are difficult, daring or simply focused on making art for art's sake rather than trying to do the job of the tourism board.

The Oscar-winning Tsotsi, based on Athol Fugard's novel, is magnificent at humanising those on both sides of South Africa's fence the middle-class suburbanites and the township gangsters living without hope. Sensitive performances by Presley Chweneyagae and Terry Pheto are the heartbeat of surely the greatest modern South African film.

Jerusalema spotlights the murder, drug-dealing and building-hijacking of Hillbrow in Johannesburg, charting the rise of a charming gangster played by Rapulana Seiphemo. It's another bleak critique of the South African dream, if there is such a thing, though sometimes a little too obviously. But again, Johannesburg is laid out in all its grimy urban glory, the ugly rendered beautiful.

Yesterday moves lyrically between the rural and urban, capturing the breadth of the country and the double life of the migrant mineworker.

It's a testament to maternal endurance and force of will, and probably the most powerful warning about the horrors of HIV/Aids yet devised.

Last year there was White Wedding, a very different animal a romantic comedy about a road trip that almost scuppers the big day. It ran the gamut of South African society, including a memorable scene in which two black men find themselves in a diehard Afrikaner drinking den. Its light touch captured something of the spirit of this wonderfully diverse nation precisely because it wasn't trying too hard.

But the biggest domestic hit was District 9, a bravura piece of science fiction about aliens stranded in a squalid settlement outside Johannesburg. Was it an allegory about apartheid, or about today's xenophobia, or just an entertaining shoot 'em up? Audiences could take from it what they wanted, but those in South Africa were flattered by that ultimate accolade space people had chosen to plant their flag in a township instead of the White House lawn.

Jerusalema and District 9 feature in the South African Cinema season that has opened at the British Film Institute in London. Others have included the 1959 classic documentary Come Back, Africa, a fierce indictment of apartheid filmed covertly in Johannesburg and Sophiatown, and Snake Dancer, which has been described as a 70s sexploitation B movie about a scandalous stripper set in a Hillbrow oddly devoid of people of colour.

When I go to my local shopping mall, in the Johannesburg suburb of Killarney, I often recall that it's built on the site of Africa's first film studio, created in 1915 and demolished in 1972. One of the first productions was De Voortrekkers which, I read, was a silent epic, racist in its depictions of Zulus and Portuguese, closing with a spectacular reconstruction of the 1838 Battle of Blood River.

Recently, very late one night, South African television showed The Birth of a Nation, DW Griffith's 1915 vision of the American civil war and its aftermath, again climaxing with a spectacular battle, again racist in its depictions of black people. It's a masterpiece that happens to be despicable, and carries a particular charge in the country that embraced apartheid.

Whatever their politics, I'd like to see such films revived and debated in cinemas in South Africa. What a city such as Johannesburg lacks, as far as I can tell, is a repertory theatre showing classics, South African or otherwise. New releases in shopping mall multiplexes rule the roost, but there should be space for Citizen Kane, Taxi Driver and reruns of Tsotsi on the big screen too.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service