The award-winning Puerto Rican drama Angélica by Marisol Gómez-Mouakad will get a virtual release in major markets including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago on August 20 via ArtMattan Films. The virtual release will be followed by a digital and home-video release.
Timeless: A Virgin Island Love Story[/caption]
The African Diaspora International Film Festival (ADIFF) 2018 will celebrate the Caribbean with films from the US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Panama, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Barbados, and T&T. The Caribbean is a rich reservoir of stories. Films from the region come in many languages. The characters have many origins and skin tones, and all the countries harbor a particular identity.
Opening Night film Timeless: A Virgin Island Love Story travels in time from 19th Century Ghana to the modern day Caribbean. It is the story of Ajuwa, a Ghanaian warrior, who loses her soulmate to the slave trade; their souls reunite in contemporary US Virgin Islands.
Angelica by Marisol Gómez-Mouakad is set in New York and Puerto Rico. Angelica has spent her whole life escaping from her mixed racial identity, but a family crisis forces her to return to Puerto Rico and rethink her life. Cimarronaje in Panama-Panama by Toshi Sakai explores how, two centuries before George Washington or Simon Bolivar dreamed of liberation from European tyranny, enslaved Africans in Panama fought for and gained their independence.
The festival will feature two revealing documentaries: Barrow, Freedom Fighter by Marcia Weekes from Barbados and Every Cook Can Govern: Documenting the Life, Impact & Works of C.L.R. James by Ceri Dingle from T&T. Barrow is a passionate docu-drama about the courage of one man who relentlessly preached a gospel of economic self-reliance and self-respect to the people of his native country Barbados and beyond. The CLR James documentary, in a historical tour-de-force, interweaves never-before-seen footage of C.L.R. James with personal contributions from those who knew him.
THE WINDRUSH AND THE BUMIDON
The Black presence in Europe is not new, but with time, the ambitions of colonial powers and the increasing extreme right wing waves, being Black in Europe implied different connotations.
Post-war UK experienced a massive arrival of people from the Caribbean, known as the Windrush. In the 1980’s arrived from Africa wealthy Nigerians and Ghanaians alongside rural migrants and refugees from Somalia and Zimbabwe. This massive presence of black people gave the UK a new flavor. ADIFF’s Windursh program illustrates Black life in the UK with the presentation of recent and classic films.
In France, the Bumidon system, a structure implemented by the French government to bring folks from their overseas territories mostly Martinique and Guadeloupe to work in France, contributed to making France a multiracial society.
ADIFF-NY 2018 will showcase a selection of films about the human experience of many men and women who left their native lands looking for a better life in the colonial metropolis.
The Story of Lovers Rock and Time and Judgement, by internationally acclaimed Barbados/UK filmmaker Menelik Shabazz, explore the history of the Black UK life experience through the arts – music, spoken word – with performances, archival footage and testimonies. Playing Away by Horace Ove from T&T is one of the ten best Afro-British films of all times. Love story The Naked Poet by Jason Barrett – whose family is from Jamaica – is representative of the work and interests of a new generation of Black British filmmakers.
The BUMIDOM system and its impact are described in They had a dream / Le Rêve Français which tells a story based on reality. It is both a social and a fictional saga, exploring the interconnected lives of two Guadeloupian families to reveal hidden and obscure aspects of French society.
The African Diaspora International Film Festival (ADIFF) celebrates its 26th anniversary from Nov. 23 to Dec. 9 with screenings to be held in five venues in Manhattan: Teachers College, Columbia University, Cinema Village, Riverside Church, The Dwyer Cultural Center and MIST Harlem.Screenings will be held in five venues in Manhattan: Teachers College, Columbia University, Cinema Village, Riverside Church, The Dwyer Cultural Center and MIST Harlem.
The Other Side of Hope[/caption]
From April 5 through 9, 2017, Curaçao International Film Festival Rotterdam (CIFFR) will unspool for the sixth time in Willemstad. CIFFR presents an interesting mix of local and regional talent and highlights from IFFR 2017. Added to the mix are some fresh new titles that have kicked up a storm at other film festivals, such as Silver Bear winner The Other Side of Hope by Aki Kaurismäki, which opens the festival on April 5.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHjcWLCZuWs
The festival – an initiative by Fundashon Bon Intenshon organized in cooperation with International Film Festival Rotterdam – seeks to inspire film-lovers and help young film talent from the region to get ahead.
Festival director Bero Beyer: “We are particularly pleased that this festival is being realized for the sixth time: it is a feast of cinema and reflection. CIFFR is a wonderful opportunity to see the world from a different perspective thanks to the many beautiful visions cinema serves up to us. The combination of films that are setting the tone internationally with local filmmakers gives the festival extra sparkle and depth. We are thrilled that, in its sixth year, CIFFR enjoys such broad support, and is therefore able to make a wide audience enthusiastic about daring films.”
For the fifth time in succession, CIFFR will present the Yellow Robin Award Competition in which feature films by talented, up-and-coming filmmakers from the Caribbean and Latin America compete for the Yellow Robin Award. The nominees are Angélica by Marisol Gómez Mouakad (Puerto Rico); Bad Lucky Goat by Samir Oliveros (Colombia); El hombre que cuida (The Man Who Cares) by Alejandro Andújar (Dominican Republic); Keyla by Viviana Gómez Echeverry (Colombia) and Melocotones by Héctor M. Valdez (Dominican Republic). The winning film gets a spot in the Bright Future program at IFFR 2018, as well as at the Morelia International Film Festival in Mexico. In addition, the Award comes with a $10,000 prize for the filmmaker.
A new feature of this sixth edition is the Caribbean Shorts Competition – the result of a cooperation initiated by the festival in 2016 with six film festivals from the region: in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mexico and Trinidad & Tobago. These festivals exchange international professionals and organize workshops and competitions in order to share knowledge and experience. Each of these six festivals submitted a film for the inaugural edition of the Caribbean Shorts Competition. The winning short film will screen at all of the festivals.
But CIFFR offers much more alongside its competitions: such as the themed program Poetry in Motion; a series of music documentaries under the Music Calls banner; an extensive educational program; special film screenings in community centers and some twenty highlights of IFFR 2017, including Barry Jenkins’ audience smash hit Moonlight, as well as films such as Jackie by Pablo Larraín and Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson.