African Film Festival, Inc. (AFF) is thrilled to announce the 31st anniversary of its iconic New York African Film Festival (NYAFF), which runs from May 8 – May 30, 2024. …
Liberation Movements and Cultural Representations of African Dreams The Indochina war, which ended in May 1954 with the battle of Dien Bien Phu, began to shake a colonial empire that …
African Film Festival, Inc. (AFF) is thrilled to announce the 30th anniversary of its iconic New York African Film Festival (NYAFF), which runs from from May 10-June 1, 2023. Under …
In March 2015, students across South Africa continued work begun by a generation that sacrificed secondary-school education to fight Apartheid. The Rhodes Must Fall movement galvanized efforts to decolonize curricula. …
“I am an Afrocentric,” Professor Sheila Walker declares in “The Virtues of Positive Ethnocentrism: Some Reflections of an Afrocentric Anthropologist.” For Walker, Afrocentrism is not an exclusionary form of “ethnic …
I said I love being Black.I love the color of my skin,it’s the skin that I’m in.I love the texture of my hair,and I rock it everywhere.I said I love …
The United Nations (UN) declared 2015–2024 the International Decade for People of African Descent with the guiding themes of Recognition, Justice, and Development. Recognition, the theme here, which might be …
Introduced in Egypt in 1896, cinema rapidly evolved to a thriving industry producing more than 4,000 films to date and becoming a distribution center for American films and, to a …
Interior↔ExteriorSubjective space, intuitive, ambivalent, willfully partisan.ThenTrace, cross out, trace again.Glimpse a fragmented reading.Trace, cross out, trace again.1Joseph Gaï Ramaka Filmmaker Joseph Gaï Ramaka, who was born in St. Louis, Senegal …
INTRODUCTION Distribution remains one of the main challenges facing African cinema. Reaching domestic and international audiences is difficult despite the promise of digital technological innovations over the last fifteen years. …
Image above: Wunmi in her Brooklyn studio where she sews costumes for the stage and works on new designs for her Wow Wow fashion line, produced in partnership with artisans …
The interview that follows with the veteran and noted Senegalese filmmaker Joseph Gaï Ramaka addresses two issues of importance to political film practice. The first concerns the deployment of the …
Amended from a speech given by Melbourne Garber, Chairman of the National Organization of Sierra Leoneans in North America and President of the Krio Descendants Union Northeast region, at the …
The oldest of eight children, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra was born in Porto Novo, Benin (former Dahomey) on January 30, 1925, His great-grandfather, a Muslim Yoruba, was a member of a …
As a part of CCP training, participants receive interviewing instructions and interview various members of Sierra Leone society. As a collection, these interviews provide a diverse overview of various segments …
While millions of Americans experience the rise and fall of summer blockbusters, enthusiastic audiences see radically different movies in jam-packed theaters. I’m not thinking of your local multiplex, where the …
Above Photo: FESPACO Headquarters (Iquo B. Essien) After an October 2014 coup toppled the 27-year presidency of Blaise Compaoré, most thought the Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO) …
Last week, I attended a screening of Ava DuVernay’s Selma about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the 1965 voting rights marches of Alabama. Desperate for inspiration, fresh off my second rejection …
Deborah Perkin is a British documentary filmmaker based in Wales, and a former-producer for the BBC. It was while working there that Perkin first pitched a story about Morocco’s family …
Is it a mere fortuitous coincidence that the last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed the re-emergence of the very same forces and ideologies of expansion, domination and control …
The UN World Conference on Race (WCAR) held August 31-September 8 in Durban, South Africa, has been sidelined in the media by occlusive coverage of the September 11th World Trade …
As locations for a film festival go, it is hard to imagine a better one than Zanzibar. The name itself conjures up images of the hyper-exotic. And it does not …
Southern African International Film and Television Market, Sithengi, could lose its identity as it re-brands itself as Cape Town World Cinema Festival. Pundits argue that Sithengi is trying to do too …
« Colonies, les cicatrices de l’histoire » : la programmation fleuve qui se tient jusqu’au 30 avril Forum des Images ouvre une brèche, loin de toute…cicatrisation. En marge des fictions, pléthoriques mais connues, …
The Elephant had a toothache, as they would say in the Ivory Coast: the “Father of African film” left us during the night of the 9th of June 2007, aged …
The 17th New York African Film Festival got underway again last week with the premiere of a stunning 8-minute satire on revolution and oil seizure titled “Dr. Cruel,” a joint venture …
Alonzo:…In your documentaries, you have this ability to extract truth from all these personalities and personages, that’s what’s so emblematic of your work. You’re getting these people to open up—how …
In this article, I draw on my experience not only as a researcher and teacher of African film, but also as an African film programmer and film festival director over …
Tunde Kelani is a seasoned Nigerian filmmaker wrapping up his sixteenth film, Dazzling Mirage. On the film’s website Mainframe Movies, his production company founded in 1991, promotes this as a “movie and …
“An African film is a miracle, like the rain.”– Youssef Ait Hamou “’No wind is favorable to a sailor who does not know what port he is headed for.’”– Seneca, …
“Clearly, African cinema, too, like African political leadership, cannot hope to advance without the presence of women on the scene…. Sembène was considered a significant feminist… But even his films …
The car glided to a stop. At least, that was how Dikeogu felt. Entering the lush “gated community,” squinting at what seemed like set-after-set of a very lavish budget Hollywood …
The night is studded with stars. Not in the sky, but at human height, swinging flimsily. Shadows flicker inside these brief yellow shafts then disappear, blurred by a screen of …
CCP documentary film instructor Idriss Kpange recently visited the New York offices of African Film Festival, Inc. and left AFF staff a lovely surprise: a video entitled “Meet Our Documentary …
Last month, AFF arranged for the Sierra Leone Cultural Conservation Program to take its participants on a field trip to Bunce Island. Located twenty miles from the CCP headquarters in …
Authors: Mark Drury, Samuel Shearer | Contributors: Jill Cole, Andrew Hernann, Ahmed Sharif Malian-French director Daouda Coulibaly begins his short film, Il Était une fois l’indépendance (A History of Independence, 2009), …
Like other forms of creative expression by Africans, filmmaking constitutes a form of discourse and practice that is not just artistic and cultural, but also intellectual and political. It is …
Since the late 1980s, a booming video feature film industry evolved in Ghana. While established filmmakers both within and outside the state-owned Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC) found it extremely …
The meeting has been under way for well over two hours, and the seven participants do not seem exhausted after strings of passionate exchanges. The scene could have been ripped …