AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center

AFI Silver is proud to host the fourth annual New African Films Festival, co-presented by AFI, TransAfrica Forum, and afrikafe. The vibrancy of African filmmaking from all corners of the continent will be on display, including 2007 Fespaco winner EZRA, 2007 Zanzibar Film Festival winner JUJU FACTORY, and the US premiere of TARTINA CITY. This year includes a special sidebar retrospective of the films of Senegal's Ousmane Sembene (1923-2007), the "Godfather of African Cinema."

ALL FILMS NOT RATED

AFI member passes will be accepted at all screenings in the New African Films Festival.

This moving film was awarded the Grand Prize at the 2007 Festival Panafricain du Cinema á Ouagadougou (Africa's largest and most prestigious film event) and selected for International Critics Week at Cannes. One morning on the way to school, seven- year-old Ezra is kidnapped by rebels - and for the next ten years remains in the jungle as a child soldier. Now a disturbed young man, Ezra finds himself in front of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Sierra Leone where he is asked to speak of his brutal attack on a village. As his mute sister listens in horror, she finally reveals a secret she has kept hidden from him.

DIR/SCR Newton I. Aduaka; SCR Alain-Michel Blanc; PROD Gorune Aprikian and Michel Loro. France/Nigeria, 2007, color, 103 min.

Kongo is a struggling author living in the Matonge district of Brussels, an area mainly populated by African immigrants. His editor wants him to deliver a traveler's handbook targeting Europeans looking for accessible exoticism, but Kongo wants to investigate the lives of the people around him and the complicated history between Belgium and the Congo.

DIR/SCR Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda. Democratic Republic of Congo, 2006, color, 97 min. In French with English subtitles.

In this assured debut from Salif Traoré, a former assistant to filmmakers Souleymane Cissé and Abderrahmane Sissako, Engineer Fili Traoré returns to his rural village in Mali - many years after having been cast out as the child of an unwed mother - to find his father and initiate a waterworks project. But his arrival coincides with the drowning of a young villager. The elders determine that Faro, the water spirit, has been angered by Traoré's return - and the only way to appease her is with sacrifice.

DIR/SCR/PROD Salif Traoré; SCR Olivier Lorelle; PROD Bärbel Mauch, Daniel Morin, Ismaël Ouédraogo and Philippe Quinsac. Mali/France/Canada/Burkina Faso/Germany, 2007, color, 96 min. In Bambara with English subtitles.

This impressive film finds a new approach to capturing the tradition-versus-modernity theme so frequently seen in African cinema. Twenty-five-year-old BB, son of the inflexible Imam Karamo - the guardian of his village's ancestral traditions - is chosen to be his father's worthy successor, but he refuses to accept his destiny. BB prefers to work independently as an artist and live with his love, the beautiful young computer scientist Kesso. (note courtesy of the Film Society of Lincoln Center)

DIR/SCR Cheick Fantamady Camara. Guinea/France, 2007, color, 97 min. In French with English subtitles.

Back by Popular Demand, from SILVERDOCS 2007
HIP HOP REVOLUTION
Special Price $5

This visually stimulating film, pumping with the sound of underground classic songs, explores the 25-year evolution of hip hop in South Africa, from its birth on the Cape Flats through the insurgence of black consciousness and the political uprising in the 1980s. Interviews with first-generation pioneers of South African hip hop explain how the African-American art form mirrored their experiences and gave youth a medium to express themselves, inciting a timely sense of black pride.

Special Event
NAMIBIA: THE STRUGGLE FOR LIBERATION
In Person: Director Charles Burnett

Charles Burnett's latest feature, starring Carl Lumbly, Danny Glover and Joel Haikali, tells the story of the first president of Namibia, Sam Nujoma, charting his political awakening and his part in his country's fight for its freedom from occupation by South Africa. Rather than a documentary-style history of the long and brutal conflict, the film mixes real and composite characters to explore the spirit and sacrifices of the struggle that culminated in independence in 1990. Covering over 60 years of history, NAMIBIA details Nujoma's youth, starting from age 14, and the events, people, and places that shaped his political consciousness and made him the uncompromising man of action he was to become.

DIR/SCR Charles Burnett; PROD Abius Akwaake, Steve Gukas. Namibia, 2007, color, 161 min. In English and Oshiwambo with English subtitles. NOT RATED

Special thanks to Sonya Michel at the University of Maryland for her invaluable support in presenting this film.

Charles Burnett will be lecturing at the University of Maryland on March 10 from 4:00 - 6:00pm with a reception to follow. Click here for more details.

"Making her feature debut with the clear-eyed, powerful HOLLOW CITY, Maria João Ganga establishes herself as a talent to be watched. First rate!" - Variety

One of the few films made in Angola since it was torn apart by civil war, this eye-opening drama is set in Luanda, the capital, in the war's aftermath. N'dala is a war orphan who escapes his caretakers, hoping to find his way back to his home village. Wandering Luanda's streets, he meets an array of characters and is lured into a robbery, while pursued by a missionary nun across the bewildering and dangerous city.

DIR/SCR Maria João Ganga; PROD François Gonot. Angola/Portugal, 2004, color, 90 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles.

Adoum, a young reporter, fights to get a passport to leave Chad. Once abroad, he hopes to do an extensive report on the situation in his country. But at the airport, a mysterious, compromising letter is found in his belongings. Adoum is arrested and ends up in the underground dungeon run by the notorious Colonel Koulbou. When Adoum's friend tracks him down, it is already too late. Meanwhile, Colonel Koulbou has a new wife, and she is already fed up with her treatment at his hands... (Note courtesy of the World Film Festival of Montreal)

In Person: Filmmaker Siatta Scott-Johnson will introduce the film and host a Q&A after the screening

SILVERDOCS is proud to present a documentary film profiling Africa's first freely elected female president.

She's already overcome tremendous obstacles to become the first woman ever elected president in Africa— now all she has to do is turn around Liberia, a country devastated by unemployment, debt, corruption, and the legacy of civil war. Follow Ellen Johnson Sirleaf through her first year in office as she faces angry mobs, ambitious political rivals, and high-ranking members of the international community. Her story is inspiring a new generation of leaders in Africa and around the world.

IRON LADIES OF LIBERIA is part of the 2007-2008 ITVS Community Campaign - VOTE DEMOCRACY! - encouraging new and young voters to get involved in the democratic process. To learn more about the VOTE DEMOCRACY! Campaign, Click Here

DIR Daniel Junge, Siatta Scott-Johnson, Henry Ansbacher and Jonathan Stack; USA, 2007, color, 77 min.

March 10, 7:00
Free event!
Tickets available at theater box office on day-of-show only; limit 4 per person.

"Hypnotic widescreen photography...well written and directed... Salgues' screenplay is perfectly crafted." -Variety

Mocktar, a Nigerian peasant, comes looking for work in Essakane, a dusty gold town in Northeast Burkina Faso where he hopes to forget his haunting past. He quickly finds out the gold rush ended twenty years before, and the inhabitants of this strangely timeless wasteland exist simply from force of habit. The beautiful Coumba, however, still courageously struggles to raise her daughter after the death of her family. Soon Mocktar will be fighting not only to survive, but also to provide a better future for this mother and child.

DIR/SCR Laurent Salgues. France/Canada/Burkina Faso, 2006, color, 86 min. In French with English subtitles.

Ousmane Sembène Retrospective
All notes courtesy of Film Forum.

FAAT KINÉ

Sembène explores women's lives in contemporary Dakar, Senegal's bustling capital, in this warm, often funny story of a single mother, her two children, two ex-husbands, aged mother and assorted friends. Sembène culturally and politically contextualizes her thoroughly modern triumphs and anxieties in a Dakar that has shantytowns as well as high-rises, streets crowded with cattle as well as Mercedes-Benzes, and women whose lives have been shaped by tribal custom and male prejudice as much as by their cutting-edge aspirations.

DIR/SCR Ousmane Sembène; PROD Wongue Mbengue. Senegal, 2000, color, 118 min. In French and Wolof with English subtitles.

Friday, March 7, 9:45

MOOLAADÉ

"As politically sophisticated a film as those of John Ford and Kenji Mizoguchi [...] the rousing finish exalts ... the power of romantic love to loosen the bonds of indifferent institutions." - Richard Brody, The New Yorker

In a remote Burkina Faso village, the impending mass ceremony of female circumcision goes wrong as this year's class of young girls resists. They jump down wells or head for the home of Collé, herself a holdout against tradition, and for her magical protection, the Moolaadé. This intense treatment of a burning issue is embedded within a three-dimensional treatment of village life — with a final outburst of courage coming from the least likely source.

DIR/SCR/PROD Ousmane Sembène. Senegal/France/Burkina Faso/Cameroon/Morocco/Tunisia, 2004, color, 124 min. In Bambara and French with English subtitles.

Saturday, March 8, 5:00

Double Feature
Sunday, March 9, 5:00

BLACK GIRL
[La Noire de...]

Diouana finds her pleasant babysitting chores for a French family in Dakar topped by an invitation to accompany them back to France; but once there, she finds she's just "the black girl." Based on actual events, Sembène's first feature makes an unsparing attack on neocolonial exploitation that put African cinema on the map. Sembène himself stars as a schoolteacher.

DIR/SCR Ousmane Sembène; PROD André Zwoboda. France/Senegal, 1966, b&w, 65 min. In French with English subtitles.

with
BOROM SARRET

Sembène's first film, a day in the life of a poor cart driver.

DIR/SCR Ousmane Sembène. Senegal, 1964, b&w, 20 min.

Sunday, March 9, 5:00

EMITAI
[God of Thunder]

When French troops come to a Diola village during WWII to conscript the men and confiscate the rice, the women hide the crop and the elders consult with the gods, but events slowly escalate to tragedy. Based on an actual incident. The film's final horrific image was initially blacked out by the French.

DIR/SCR Ousmane Sembène. Senegal, 1971, color, 103 min. In French and Wolof with English subtitles.

Monday, March 10, 9:00

CAMP DE THIAROYE

Based on an actual historical incident, this "magisterial critique of the colonial mentality" (critic J. Hoberman) received a Special Jury Prize from the Venice Film Festival. In 1944, African infantrymen, back from slugging it out with the Nazis and liberating Paris, relax in a transit camp in Senegal, but they [soon] realize "transit" should read "prison," and "war heroes" should read "uppity natives."

DIR/SCR Ousmane Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow; PROD Mustafa Ben Jemja, Ouzid Dahmane and Mamadou Mbengue. Senegal, 1987, color, 157 min. In French and Wolof with English subtitles.

Tuesday, March 11, 6:45

GUELWAAR

Bad enough that political activist Guelwaar ("the noble one") has just died mysteriously, right after a mesmerizing opening speech - but where's the body? Misidentified and buried in a Muslim cemetery? But he was a Catholic! The solution is obvious - but the disinterment plans rapidly derail as a bitingly comic firestorm of red tape, intra-family disputes, and religious turf wars threaten to escalate into mayhem.

DIR/SCR/PROD Ousmane Sembène; PROD Jacques Perrin. France/Germany/Senegal, 1992, color, 115 min. In French and Wolof with English subtitles.

Thursday, March 13, 7:00

CEDDO

In a 19th-century village, a princess is kidnapped, and a Muslim imam struggles against a Catholic priest for religious and political control, while the ceddo ("ched-doe", or common people) try to hold on to their traditional ways. Banned in Senegal Sembène's historical epic condenses two centuries of African history into a thriller of oppression and intolerance.

DIR/SCR Ousmane Sembène. Senegal, 1977, color, 120min. In French and Wolof with English subtitles

Thursday, March 13, 9:20

MANDABI
[The Money Order]

"A richly comic and multi-textual first cousin to THE BICYCLE THIEF." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

Illiterate, unemployed, 50-ish Ibrahima Deng suddenly gets a windfall: a money order from his streetsweeper nephew in France for 20,000 francs (roughly $100). But he finds he can't cash it without an identity card, which requires a proof of birth, which . . . Sembène's first color film is a darkly humorous satire of Kafkaesque bureaucracy and corruption, as Deng concludes, "honesty is a sin in this country."

DIR/SCR Ousmane Sembène; PROD Jean Maumy. France/Senegal, 1968, color, 90 min. In French and Wolof with English subtitles.

Friday, March 14, 9:15; Saturday, March 15, 1:00

XALA
[The Curse]

Sembène's take on Animal Farm in Africa is a savagely funny satire of the new post-independence ruling class, as [a] fifty-ish fat cat enjoys a flourishing import business, two wives (traditional and Westernized), and a white Mercedes - and gets appointed to the Chamber of Commerce. Time to add that third wife, but on the wedding night he fails to rise to the occasion. Could he be the victim of a xala? The film, despite government censorship, broke Senegalese box office records and hit its targets where they lived.

DIR/SCR Ousmane Sembène; PROD Paulin Vieyra. Senegal, 1975, color, 123 min. In French and Wolof with English subtitles.

Saturday, March 15, 9:30; Sunday, March 16, 9:30; Monday, March 17, 8:45