From documentaries to musicals, features to shorts, art house to mainstream, the films of this year's Africana Film Festival reflect the breadth of Africana cinema, which includes movies from African diaspora cultures as well as Africa itself.
The festival, which runs at the Cable Car Cinema from April 13 to 17, will show 15 films from 12 countries and host three panel discussions. Now in its second year, the festival expanded the scope of its screenings from last year by including African diasporic films and inviting more speakers from outside Brown. The ultimate intention is to reach beyond the academic community, said Richard Manning, one of the festival directors and a film archivist for the Department of Modern Culture and Media.
Some of the festival's highlights this year include the Rhode Island premieres of "Moolade" and "Agogo Eewo." "Moolade," a Senegalese film directed by Africa's most famous filmmaker, Ousmane Sembene, tells the story of six girls' escape from an African ceremony of female circumcision.
Director Tunde Kelani's film "Agogo Eewo" is a critical allegory of the corruption of Nigerian politics. The movie is an example of a new trend in Nigerian cinema called Nollywood, a kind of film that "doesn't stay within one genre," Manning said.
"The director's going into it as if there are no rules," he said.
International Writers Fellow for the Watson Institute Pierre Mumbere Mujomba will lead a screenwriting panel about writing for theater and screen in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A noted playwright and novelist, Mujomba conflicted with the Congolese government in January 2002 after the performance of his politically subversive play "The Last Envelope."
Meadow Dibble-Dieng, a fifth-year graduate student in French Studies, with the help of Manning and Philip Rosen, professor of modern culture and media, founded the festival last year as the African Film Festival, which showed only films from Africa. Dibble-Dieng conceived of the idea for a festival as a way of giving exposure to a branch of cinema that's becoming increasingly important but still not widely seen, said Claudia Esposito, co-director of the festival and also a fifth-year graduate student in French Studies.
The event is sponsored by the Forbes Center for Culture and Media Services Studies, the Office of the President, the International Writers Project, the Heimark Fund and the Department of Africana Studies.
Tickets are $3 for students and $5 for general admission. The Cable Car Cinema is located on 204 S. Main St. For more information, visit www.brown.edu/aff.
