The African Film Festival, Inc., (AFF) celebrates the 13th edition of the New York African Rim Festival in 2006. For over a decade, AFF has used cinema as a tool to bring African culture, history, and politics to thousands of viewers by presenting classic and cutting edge features, shorts, and documentary films by filmmakers from the Continent and its Diaspora.

From the Sudan to the Ivory Coast to South Africa, veteran and emerging filmmakers who have witnessed the legacy of war and subsequent migration are using film to address the issues changing the face of the African continent today. Films such as Khalo Matabane’s Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon document African immigrants’ experiences of xenophobia in South Africa, while Taghreed Elsanhouri’s All About Darfur, Jacqueline Kalimunda’s Homeland, and Martha Qumba’s It’s Me, It’s Me explore the personal narrative of displacement, experiences of xenophobia, homophobia and discovery that follow the filmmakers’ voyages back home in search of reconciliation and understanding.

AFF’s first presentation of films from the Maghreb includes works by daring and independent filmmakers, like Pascal Tessaud’s L’ete de Noura, and Namir Abdel Messeeh’s Toi Waguih which relate stories of second-generation North Africans living in the Diaspora who seek to synthesize the Old and New worlds in which they co-exist.

The festival opens with U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, a musically exquisite adaptation of Bizet’s Carmen set in a South African township. The Festival Centerpiece premieres Zola Maseko’s Drum, based on the legendary lives of Drum Magazine journalists in 1950s apartheid South Africa.

AFF is proud to present a mid-career retrospective of Jean-Pierre Bekolo, a groundbreaking Cameroonian filmmaker whose films are known for their grit, humor, and post-modem sensibility and have been hailed as some of the first science-fiction films to come out of Africa.

In 2006 AFF joins forces with the Apollo Theater to produce a critical symposium titled “Africa in Transition-Today!,” which explore issues of African identity and cultural authenticity. AFF in collaboration with the International Center of Photography presents two evenings of screenings featuring the experimental works of Theo Eshetu and the late Djibril Diop Mambèty.

The 2006 New York African Film Festival launches on April 20th at the historic Apollo Theater, and runs from April 26th to May 4th at the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center. The Festival continues at International Center of Photography on May 12th and 19th, and concludes in conjunction with DanceAfrica at Brooklyn Academy of Music, from May 26th through 29th.

The 13th New York African Film Festival was organized by Richard Peña of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the African Film Festival, Inc. (Mahen Bonetti, Aba Taylor, Muriel Placet-Kouassi, A. Naomi Jackson, Alonzo Speight, and Wilson Sherwin), with special thanks to the Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative, Putumayo, Columbia School of the Arts, AFF Board of Directors, Joan Baffour, Luca Bonetti, Francoise Bouffault, Rumbi Bwerinofa, Gabriel Donati, Kevin Duggan, Jacki Fischer, Belynda Hardin, Andrew Milne, Prerana Reddy, Mohamed Sillah, Rene Taylor, Kojo Associates and AFF’s volunteer team.