CinemAfrica is Sweden’s vessel for the promotion of African film, and their annual festival is back at the end of February. And what makes this edition very special is that it’s their 20th anniversary edition. There’s an almost impossible-to-keep-track-of amount of events happening at this year’s festival, with film showings (including Alain Gomis’ Felicité and documentary biographies of Grace Jones and Sammy Davis Jr) and guest appearances from Sophie Fiennes, director of 2006’s The Pervert’s Guide To Cinema (and the Grace Jones doc Grace Jones: Bloodlight And Bami) and the celebrated director Mahamat Saleh Haroun. We met the festival director Dina Afkhampour and festival manager Hawa Sanneh to discuss this year’s events.
First of all, congrats on the 20th anniversary. How does it feel to reach that milestone, and how have the 20th anniversary celebrations come into the planning of the festival?
Dina: It feels really amazing to make it to twenty, because it’s not an easy feat to remain relevant and keep your place in the cultural landscape. Especially in film, people like to download and it’s hard to get people into the cinema. So I think to have remained in the public eye and relevant is good. This year we’ve really tried to look back on the last twenty years, in the programming, and find some highlights in the films, but also to incorporate as many of the directors we’ve grown up with over the last twenty years as possible.
Hawa: As Dina says, this year will be a big celebrate. We’re getting bigger and we’re celebrating!
Are there any specific events planned?
Dina: The opening night will really reflect it. We have a secret performance. We’ve asked Johannes Anyuru to put on a special recital of his poetry. And we’ll have present during the festival all of the people who’ve grown up with CinemAfrica and made it what it is today. Hawa and I have only been here for five or six years, and there have been so many before us who’ve made sure that CinemAfrica grows and have invested so much time over the years. I would say almost all the events we have planned have an element that reflects the twentieth anniversary. Even in the talks and other events, we’re kind of taking a look back at Afro-Swedish presence in Sweden.
Can you talk us through this year’s programme from the film point of view, what you’re showing and some particular highlights?
Hawa: We have this AfroFutures package with really good films. That’s my favourite package.
Dina: I would say probably the #MeToo package, which is really interesting because it’s intersectional in its approach, it’s not just about women, it’s about specifically black women and African who deal with sexual violence. I hope it sparks a certain debate at the festival. Obviously we have the bigger films, like the Grace Jones biography and the Sammy Davis Jr biography, those two were to me were such eye-openers. They aren’t just about the music from these two geniuses, but instead more the culture they come from, and the historical perspective them come from.
Two of the films from 2017 that you’re showing, Alain Gomis’ Felicité and John Trengrove’s The Wound were shortlisted for Oscar nominations this year. Do you think this is a particularly rich moment for African film?
Dina: Definitely, I would say. They made it to the last round for nominations and were cut for the final, but the fact that they made it that far, that they have touched people around the world. A lot of the major film festivals programmed them and gave them a platform, along with I Am Not A Witch (Rungano Nyoni, 2017) , the film from Zimbabwe. I feel like each one of these films made it in from the periphery, to the mainstream. It highlights African filmmaking in a new way, it’s not just for the art house crowd.
I wanted to ask about a related aspect of that. A part of your programme is entitled ‘Films That Happen To Be African’ And it’s dedicated to films that “aren’t representative of their country, or the first of their kind”, or cultural landmarks or whatever. Do you think that’s a problem in the way a lot of people perceive African film, that they believe African films must have some kind of social value, or be defining of Africa or whatever? They can’t see them as just films?
Dina: Yeah, definitely. We talk about that all the time, I hear people say all the time “CinemAfrica’s so important”. But it should also be pleasurable, it should be entertainment, it should be that normally. So they should be normalised and not looked upon as anything special. They don’t have to be some kind of teaching moment all the time, with moralistic value, but instead can encompass all kinds of entertainment and art. They can just be treated like every other cultural work.
Because we don’t look to every film from France to be defining of France, for example?
Dina: Right. There is this aspect of voyeurism, that people come to see literally a landscape, and they want to have that experience of seeing African countries. And that’s okay to some extent, but some of these stories transcend that, they transcend geography and just are universal in their story and their artistic value and their cinematography.
Can you talk us through some of the guests you’ve lined up for this year?
Hawa: We have around ten guests. Katarina Hedrén was a member of the CinemAfrica board a couple of years ago. She curated the Films That Happen To Be African category. We have Jon S. Goff, who’s a film specialist at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. We have some actors from South Africa. And Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, who’s an important filmmaker.
Dina: We also have Sophie Fiennes, who made the Grace Jones film, and Nabil Ayouch, a filmmaker from North Africa. They’ll be doing Q’n’As in support of the films, and we have a programme for young Afro-Swedish filmmakers and Mahamat will be talking to them and doing a one-hour masterclass with them. In general, it’s to support their films and to add to the cultural life of Stockholm during the period of the festival.
Speaking of that youth aspect, how big a part of the festival is the schools programme?
Hawa: We’ll have the Skolbio during the festival. It will be a more open type of screening. It will be held at Rum För Barn at Kulturhuset, and Kista Bibliotek. We usually have Skolbio annually too, it well be at Skärholmens Biograf, Kista Bibliotek and Tensta Konsthall.
Dina: I think it’s a super-important part of what we do. We’re really trying to cultivate a new generation of cinema-goers, and people who appreciate African film and African stories, and also to indirectly teach youth and young people how to have an expanded world view, and to really see the world as one country in one sense, to avoid a kind of other-ising.
One of the aims of CinemaAfrica is to “drive important questions and meaningful dialogue within society”. Do you think that’s a responsibility that every film festival should have, to some extent?
Dina: Yes, to some extent. I can’t imagine why you would have a platform or a meeting place for people like a film festival, where you don’t encourage or push the envelope in a way, and raise questions that are daring, and really highlight certain aspects of our global culture. Why not do that?
As a final question: when you’re putting together the whole programme, would you say there’s any one quality that unites all the films?
Dina: Yeah, I would say for us quality means that the story impacts you and leaves you wanting more, and ignites some kind of dialogue: you’ll be talking about that film when you leave the cinema. You’ll tell all of your friends about it afterwards. That moreish feeling of wanting to get more out of the film, or add more to the film through your own experience. And also that sense that the film is like sort of adding to the culture in a way that we often don’t get. A lot of the films are films that wouldn’t normally get distributed. So that special feeling of going to the cinema and seeing something that you might not usually have access to: A real independent view.
CinemAfrica’s festival takes place between Feb 26 and Mar 4 at various venues. For more info and full schedule see www.cinemafrica.se
Photo: Dina Afkhampour and Hawa Sanneh by Justine Balagade
