The 33rd Annual African Diaspora International Film Festival returns to New York City from November 28 to December 14, 2025, with a lineup of over 70 films about people of color from Peru to Zimbabwe, from the USA to Belgium, and from New Zealand to Jamaica.
The in-person festival opens with the New York Premiere of The Dutchman, a modern, surreal psychological thriller adaptation of Amiri Baraka’s explosive 1964 play. The festival will close with the New York Premiere of Jean-Claude Flamand-Barny’s Fanon, a biographical drama tracing Martiniquan psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s formative years in 1950s Algeria.
Films include the Centerpiece Screening of the Rhythm of Dammam showing the unique history of the African Diaspora in India. The powerful drama focuses on the Siddi community, whose family rituals and traditional Dammam music are used to address inter-generational trauma.
The lineup also includes Gala screenings of festival standouts such as Sugar Island (Dominican Republic), a bold portrayal of identity and struggle, and the US Premiere of the Moroccan thriller The Ants directed by Yassine Fennane.
The festival will host a special event and conversation with director Leslie Harris, following a screening of the restored version of her landmark 1992 film, Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.. Harris will discuss her role as one of the first Black women to write, direct, and produce a theatrically released feature film.
The Silenced Voices: Cinema and Censorship program revisits critical films once banned or suppressed for challenging political, religious, or moral norms. Featured titles include the earliest surviving feature by the Black director Oscar Michaux, Within Our Gates (1920) censored due to Due raw scenes of racial violence, and Uptight by Jules Dassin (1968), which was suppressed for its sympathetic portrayal of Black militants. A Censorship and Cinema panel featuring legal scholar Tanya Katerí Hernández will be held on Friday, December 12.
The festival showcases the breadth of the diaspora with seven New York premieres from FESPACO (the Pan African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou). FESPACO is widely regarded as the mythical center of the Pan-African film universe and is the largest and most important film festival on the continent. Among those is the thriller Diya, the Price of Blood (Chad), a film that also screened at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).
The Francophone selection, supported by the OIF and Québec Government Office, highlights films from Canada, Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Belgium, Haiti, Burkina Faso, Cameroon and Guadeloupe.
Other films of note include the Afro-Brazilian historical epic Malês: The Revolt, a journey of resistance set in 1835 Salvador, and the urgent drama The Song of the Rifles (Burkina Faso), which follows a twelve-year-old forced into rebel ranks amid a civil war, charting his desperate fight to reclaim his humanity.
In-person screenings for the African Diaspora International Film Festival will be held at key New York venues, including Teachers College, Columbia University; Cinema Village ; and The Lenfest Center for the Arts. Additionally, a curated Mini Virtual Festival will make 20 titles accessible nationwide across the U.S. and Canada .
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