African Film Festival 2018

March 8–May 6, 2018

This annual festival showcases the best of African cinema and films from the diaspora.

Read full description

Green White Green
Play the Devil
Marabout
Uprize!

Upcoming
Films
Upcoming
Events
Selected
Objects
Past
Films
Past
Events

Past Films

Vaya
- Sunday, May 6 7 PM
Akin Omotoso
South Africa, 2016
Three strangers from the South African hinterlands journey to bustling Johannesburg looking for success but find far more than they bargained for in this well-crafted urban noir, an Amores perros for twenty-first-century Africa.
Africa and the Diaspora: Short Films
- Wednesday, May 2 7 PM
Tonight’s program mingles short African fiction films with documentary essays from the diaspora. Discover works by Alassane Sy and Mamadou Dia (Senegal), Cedric Ido (Burkina Faso), Lebert Bethune (Jamaica), and Carlos Javier Ortiz (Oakland by way of Chicago).

Carlos Javier Ortiz in Person
Green White Green
- Thursday, April 19 7 PM
Abba Makama
Nigeria, 2016
Three friends join together to get through the dog days of a Lagos summer—and create a film—in this salute to the creativity and vitality of Nigerian youth, which has garnered comparisons to early Spike Lee.
Pioneer of Nigerien Cinema: Short Films by Moustapha Alassane
- Sunday, March 25 7 PM
Alassane’s films range from animations to ethnography-infused comedies and adaptations of African legends, all sharing a playful humor and incisive commentary on modern Africa.
Play the Devil
- Thursday, March 22 7 PM
Maria Govan
Trinidad & Tobago, Bahamas, United States, 2016
Bahamian director Maria Govan, one of the Caribbean’s rising filmmakers, returns with this atmospheric noir drama on class divides, sexual repression, and identity in Trinidad.
Mapantsula
- Sunday, March 18 4:30 PM
Oliver Schmitz, Thomas Mogotlane
South Africa, 1988
An apolitical small-time crook in Soweto gets swept up in political protests in this legendary 1988 film, the first anti-apartheid feature made in South Africa and a still-vital time capsule of protest, street culture, and pride.

Introduction by Cornelius Moore
The African Who Wanted to Fly
- Sunday, March 11 7 PM
Samantha Biffot
Gabon, France, Belgium, 2016
This sweet-natured documentary showcases the remarkable life of a man who journeyed from a small Gabonese village to China to study martial arts, and eventually star in kung fu films. With Nora Chipaumire’s Afrofuturist short Afro Promo #1 (Kinglady).
Uprize!
- Thursday, March 8 7 PM
Sifiso Khanyile
South Africa, 2017
Uprize! revisits South Africa’s Soweto Uprising, which began as a student rebellion and became a founding moment in the history of anti-apartheid struggle. With Jamaican filmmaker Lebert Bethune’s historic 1967 film Malcolm X: Struggle for Freedom.

Introduction by Gillian Hart

African Film Festival 2018

March 8–May 6, 2018

Highlighting the best of both African cinema and the black diasporic experience in film, this year’s edition of the African Film Festival showcases great political movements and cultural moments, as well as the individual choices that can sometimes affect an entire nation. The archival rediscovery Malcolm X: Struggle for Freedom showcases footage of Malcolm in Africa; the documentary Uprize! revisits South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement and the Soweto Uprising, while a small-time crook finds himself swept up in politics in the landmark 1988 work Mapantsula, South Africa’s very first anti-apartheid feature. The personal becomes political as bohemian artists in Lagos try (and often fail) to make ends meet in the meta-Nollywood Nigerian satire Green White Green, a young man battles class issues and sexuality during Trinidad’s Carnival in Play the Devil, and three strangers find themselves in a deadly Johannesburg in the supercharged urban noir Vaya. Discover the story of “the first black man in Shaolin Temple” in the delightful documentary The African Who Wanted to Fly, and listen in on one family’s experience of the Great Migration in A Thousand Midnights. Of related interest, Sacred Places, Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Marie Téno’s look at Ouagadougou cine-clubs, screens in our series Reverse Angle.

Jason Sanders, Film Note Writer

Less

The African Film Festival National Traveling Series is organized by the African Film Festival, Inc. The BAMPFA presentation is coordinated by Film Curator Kathy Geritz and copresented by the Department of African American Studies and the Center for African Studies at UC Berkeley. This touring series has been made possible by the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and The Ed Bradley Family Foundation. Special thanks to Mahen Bonetti, director, and Dara Ojugbele, program coordinator, for their assistance and support. The festival at BAMPFA includes additional titles. Prints provided by the African Film Festival National Traveling Series, unless indicated otherwise. The program of Moustapha Alassane’s films is organized with Amélie Garin-Davet, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, New York, with special thanks to La Cinémathèque Afrique de l’Institut Français, and to Bérénice Reynaud, REDCAT.

Supporter

Cultural Services of the French Embassy
Supporter

La Cinémathèque Afrique de l’Institut Français