the fifteenth New York African Film Festival
April 9 –15, 2008
We are honored to welcome Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka and veteran film director Charles Burnett to receptions during the festival.
The New York African Film Festival (NYAFF) celebrates its 15th anniversary with a lineup of 40 films from 22 countries throughout Africa and the African Diaspora, emphasizing history and storytelling, technology and the future. In a compelling array of features, shorts and documentaries, as well as experimental film and archival footage, the festival selects from treasured stories of the past, as well as contextualizes the present and future within the framework of history.
The Festival is also showcasing works by a new wave of female African cineastes. Through eye witness accounting, social activism and pure fiction, Osvalde Lewat-Hallade, Ngozi Onwurah, Katy Léna Ndiaye, Zina Saro Wiwa and other female filmmakers challenge and question the taboo traditions of the Continent and the Black community at large.
“Cinema is such an important medium for Africans, as it functions to both preserve the oral tradition and to act as a vehicle to bring Africa’s voice to the world stage,” said Mahen Bonetti, founder and executive director of the AFF. “The rapid advances in the field of media technologies is presenting the people of Africa and the African Diaspora more opportunities than ever before to dictate the terms of their destiny and to tell their stories on their own terms.”
The Festival continues its tradition of screening archival footage from the African continent by observing the 50th anniversary of independence of the Republic of Guinea. Also featured are slave routes and migration passages from Eastern and Northern Africa, including the film Baa Baa Black Girl, which examines the indigenous Afro-Turk community born during the Ottoman Empire, and the premiere episode of The African Slave Trades: Across the Indian Ocean, narrated by Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka. Films such as Charles Burnett’s Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation, Cuba: An African Odyssey and Brothers in Arms all directly link liberation movements in Southern and Western Africa to the history of the African Diaspora, charting trajectories of political awakening that are not yet popularly known. In Juju Factory and Shoot the Messenger, we become interlocutors within the realms of truth and reconciliation. Goodbye Mothers, based on the 1960s emigration of Moroccan Jews to the new state of Israel, reminds audiences of the long-standing relationship that Jews and Muslims have consciously shared. Through ironic inversion, Africa Paradis chronicles tomorrow’s émigrés who find themselves in a prosperous yet sometimes inhospitable African nation.
Finally, Isaac Julien’s experimental film Fantôme Afrique, along with This is My Africa and Awaiting for Men, represent the epitome of the 2008 New York African Film Festival. Daring, crisp and lush, the films manifest visual metaphors for Africa –– at once historical and futuristic –– exposing the timelessness and rigor of the storytelling epic.
The films in this year’s Festival span genres as well as the Continent and the African Diaspora. They explore the past and the future of African cinema. Some of the films depict fictional or real-life tales selected from storytelling treasures of the past. Others highlight contemporary stories that contextualize Black people’s present realities within the framework of history. And still others delve deeply into filmmakers’ projections of the future, from where they stand today. They are works that help people make sense of the past, consider the present and speculate on what is to come in the future. In this spirit - as the lights go down - let us explore our history and our future together.
For a listing of the films in the series go to Program Overview. Please note: all non-English African Film Festival films are subtitled in English.
Click on
Calendar to view the schedule, film descriptions and to purchase tickets online.
The festival continues at FIAF, French Institute Alliance Francaise on May 6, 13, 20 & 27, and at BAMCinématek, May 23–26.
The 15th Anniversary New York African Film Festival was organized by Richard Peña of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and African Film Festival, Inc. (Mahen Bonetti, Aba Taylor, Alonzo Speight and Muriel Placet-Kouassi). With special thanks to the AFF Board of Directors, Joan Baffour, Luca Bonetti, Francoise Bouffault, Rumbi Bwerinofa, Gabriel Donati, Kevin Duggan, Jacki Fischer, Odette A. Gregory, Belynda Hardin, Alexander Markov, Andrew Milne, Philippa Naughten, Prerana Reddy, Cheryl Duncan, Terrie Williams Agency and Kojo Associates. The programs of AFF are made possible by the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts, American Express, RGAKFD-Russia, New York State Council for the Arts, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, JPMorgan Chase, UNESCO, New York Foundation for the Arts, International Organization of La Francophonie, New York Times Community Affairs Department, Time Warner Cable, French Cultural Services, Institute of African Studies of the University of Columbia, Bloomberg, Tides Foundation, GoCard, Namibian Film Commission, WNYC, Continental Airlines, 57 Main St. Wine Company, Putumayo World Music and Omnipak Import, Enterprises, Inc.
