CinemAfrica is a festival in Scandinavia that showcases African film. It was started in 1998 and today it has become the largest festival in Scandinavia for films from the African continent and diaspora. This year, CinemAfrica will take place between the 2nd and the 6th of October in various venues across Stockholm, Sweden.
A diverse range of genres are covered at the festival. Some of the highlights of this year’s upcoming festival are:
Saturday 5th October –
FANON, YESTERDAY, TODAY
Frantz Fanon is one of the most important intellectuals of the 20th century, a foreground figure in postcolonial theory. His psychologically insightful and mercilessly colonial-critical books, such as “Black Skin, White Masks” and “The Damned of the Earth,” and not least his prowess and his participation in Algeria’s freedom struggle, still inspire generations of academics and activists.
Photographer Hassane Mezine has for several years traveled across three continents to put together what is in many ways the most profound film biography ever made about Fanon. With deep searches in archives and interviews with many of the people who worked near him, we can follow Fanon’s life, from the school years at Martinique through France, South Africa and Algeria and to his premature death. But the movie is just as much about the seeds he sowed and continues to be so around the world. What does Fanon mean today, and how does his successor look at what has happened to the world during the half-century he has no longer been with us?
Image courtesy of CinemAfrica
Find a Vimeo clip and more info about this film here
DACHRA
Three journalism students taking a course in digging journalism begin to innovate in a case of a woman who is secretly kept locked up in a mental institution, without formal medical records. When they do manage to come in and meet her, she seems to recognize one of the students, the staunch reporter Yasmine, whose dark nightmares hide a blood-soaked family secret…
Dachra, by director Debdelhamid Bouchnak, is one of the first horror films in Tunisian history. But with skillful craftsmanship, unexpected camera angles and flashes to some of the most acclaimed classics of horror film history, the film manages to build an increasingly nasty supernatural mood that has made horror movie enthusiasts around the world rejoice. And when the protagonists finally follow the trail to a solitary farm far out in the wilderness, with an overly seductive smiling housewife and strangely evasive women, the story is set for a truly phase-awake end.
SUNDAY 6th OCTOBER –
FIG TREE
In recent years, the Ethiopian diaspora in Israel has risen with an ever stronger film voice. The specific experience of being Jewish in Ethiopia and being black in Israel has led to a wealth of brilliant, multifaceted stories of discrimination, belonging and migration. Alamork Davidian, whose short film “Facing The Wall” appeared on CinemAfrica last year, is one of the strongest new filmmakers and is now making his feature film debut with acclaimed and multiple award-winning “Fig Tree”, which, like “Facing the Wall”, is partly autobiographical.
The year is 1989 and full civil war is going on several fronts in Ethiopia, with dictator Mengistu’s regime about to collapse – but dangerous as a wounded animal, and with an increasingly tough grip on the capital, Addis Ababa. The imaginative teenage girl Mina and her grandmother are finally about to flee to Israel. But Mina refuses to let go of Eli, her best friend. And with the army increasingly threatening, she will be faced with an impossible and fatal choice.
More information on Fig Tree here
EVERYTHING MUST FALL
In 2015, the #RhodesMustFall movement in South Africa unleashed a global wave of protests against the statues of colonialism that swept across Europe and North America. But at home, it also paved the way for even more radical student movement, #FeesMustFall, which struggled for lower university fees, free higher education and that university employees would receive higher salaries. At the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa’s most prestigious, students occupied large parts of the campus and, during a long fall, forced the university management to back down. But shortly thereafter, the contraction came, and it was far more brutal than the protest movement could have expected.
Image courtesy of CinemAfrica
Rehad Desai, one of South Africa’s most important radical documentary filmmakers, follows #FeesMustFall from the first demonstrations and all the way through negotiations, protests, betrayals and hopes. With interviews with all the key players on both sides, he creates a fact-filled and detailed story about a movement that shook South Africa’s self-image basically.
Find out more about this screening here
~
There are so many more films screening at CinemAfrica. Check them out here.
More information about the festival in general, including how to buy tickets, can be found here.
~
Follow CinemAfrica on Facebook and Instagram.
Categories: Announcements, News, & Upcoming
In other Words… AiW news & wrap for September 
africainwords.com 
join the discussion: