Starting today, filmmakers from Jamaica, Ghana, Cameroon and Cuba will arrive on Brown’s campus to discuss their films and life’s work with Providence audiences. The 2010 Africana Film Festival features a retrospective of work by The Black Audio Film Collective. John Akomfrah (Ghana/UK) and Lina Gopaul (Jamaica/UK), founding members of the collective and current members of Smoking Dog Films, have chronicled and cross-examined Britain’s new multicultural reality since 1983. Their best-known work, Handsworth Songs (1986), will screen prior to their newest work, Genome Chronicles (2008) at 6:45 p.m. on Saturday, April 17. It is regarded as emblematic of a turn towards archival and documentation in recent art. Gopaul and Akomfrah will join filmmakers Gloria Rolando, Cuba’s foremost female filmmaker, and Jean-Marie Teno (Cameroon) for a panel discussion moderated by Professor Anthony Bogues of Brown’s Africana Studies Department at 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, April 18th.
In addition to being able to hear directly from filmmakers who rarely if ever make their way to New England, let alone the US, Africana Film Festival audiences will have unprecedented opportunities to view films that are seldom seen in North America. Screenings of Sex, Okra & Salted Butter (Mali), Wrestling Ground (Senegal) and No Time To Die (Ghana) as well other shorts and features from Kenya, Burkina-Faso, and Chad make for a diverse and exciting look at the world of Afro-Diasporic cinema.