Film festivals take African cultural heritage around the world – and help keep it alive

Source: The Conversation – Africa

African film festivals were once quite rare, but in the past decades they’ve been growing in the continent and mushrooming around the world. A recent open access book explores these events through case studies.

The book’s editor, African cinema scholar Sheila Petty, has also written chapters in it about the role film festivals play in creating a living and lasting conversation about African culture. We asked her five questions.

What generally happens at a film festival?

Since the world’s first international film festival in Venice, Italy, in 1932, film festivals have created spaces for the discovery of new stories and cultures. The main idea is to bring films to local audiences that wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to see them in movie theatres. These festivals can be large or small, annual or a one-off event.

Some film festivals offer premiere screenings and red carpet events. A jury awards prizes for best film, best directing, best acting and the like. This can include audiences voting for the most popular film. Many festivals focus on a single topic or genre (like documentary or fantasy or climate change) and this determines the type of films shown at them.

Festivals act as community-builders. They are also spaces where lifelong friendships and working relationships can be formed through the love of cinema. They don’t just programme films, they also hold workshops and discussion panels, and often other cultural exhibits of art, music and performance.

Filmmakers and industry professionals might attend them to market and discuss their films, often with the hopes of attracting funding to make their next movie or find distribution deals. Local audiences have the opportunity to chat with film directors and learn about the production process. Emerging talent is often showcased in pitching forums.

How has the film festival grown in Africa?

The oldest film festivals on the continent include:

Carthage Film Festival (Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage), founded in Tunisia in 1966
Fespaco (Festival Panafricain du Cinéma et de la Télévision de Ouagadougou), founded in Burkina Faso in 1969
Cairo International Film Festival, founded in Egypt in 1976
Durban International Film Festival, founded in South Africa in 1979.

Other festivals have followed, like the Zanzibar International Film Festival in Tanzania, the Marrakech International Film Festival in Morocco and Afriff (the African International Film Festival) in Nigeria. Some of these are also partnering with festivals outside the continent.

Two chapters in the book focus on festivals in Africa. One is on the mythology of Fespaco and how this event has remained the continent’s most prestigious meeting place for cinephiles despite ongoing threats of political instability, regional insecurity and financial precarity.

Another chapter focuses on how the Festival Films Femmes Afrique and the StLouis’ Docs in Senegal are innovating how networking can build capacity and boost the circulation of African films.

How does the book cover African film festivals overseas?

I’m interested in what happens to knowledge, cultural expressions and creative forms that arise in Africa and then travel around the globe and adapt to new places.

Chapters in the book focus on North American film festivals whose mandates include providing a meeting place and space of celebration and dialogue between diverse local communities and African cultures in the diaspora.

Vues d’Afrique is North America’s largest and longest-running African film festival. It was established in Montreal in 1984 to introduce African and Creole cinema and culture to Quebec and Canada. One of its goals is to forge links with other African cinema festivals around the world.

Over the years it has expanded its offerings to include conferences, art exhibitions, film training projects for school kids, and year round screenings. Every July, it hosts free public moonlight screenings in a park that attract thousands.

In 2015, the first edition of the New York Forum of Amazigh Film was established. It celebrates north Africa’s Amazigh history, culture and language through film.

In Mexico, FestAfro (the Festival Artistico Audiovisual Afrodescendencias) was founded in 2021 by a group of researchers, artists, activists and communities. The goal is to celebrate Afro-Mexican identity through a multidisciplinary travelling showcase of arts.

Festivals like these, from Brazil to the UK, are discussed in the book. They highlight the value of film festivals for the exchange of living cultural heritage between communities and societies.

How does cultural exchange happen at festivals?

In the book there’s a fascinating case study. In 2022 and 2023, three different African film festivals in Brazil and Canada chose the same film to screen so that they could compare audience reactions. The film, produced in Kenya a year earlier, was Maïmouna Jallow’s Tales of the Accidental City.

Her Nairobi comedy looks at social justice issues through five characters who gather over a Zoom call for a court-ordered anger management class. The filmmaker attended all three festivals and led conversations with very different audiences in Curitiba, Winnipeg and Montreal.

In Brazil, the audience was in laughter and tears. The injustices shown in the film resonated with the experiences of members of local Black and Indigenous communities present. Winnipeg’s audience had a large presence of Kenyan migrants, who laughed harder at certain comedy scenes than other audience members. They related their lived experiences back home to those of the film’s characters. Many viewers in Montreal couldn’t recall when they had laughed so hard at a screening at the festival. With many women present, the conversation also focused on the vital role of African women in shaping their own, authentic stories on screen.

The experiment showed how inter-cultural conversation can be sparked by a film and how it is programmed at a festival, creating a space of sharing and learning about a diverse world.

This book presents cultural heritage, exhibited through film festivals, as a shared human and transglobal concern that must move across borders and be passed on to future generations.

When cultures are forgotten, humanity loses access to perspectives and worldviews that could help address life’s challenges. A broad, diverse understanding of history and culture helps us see where we are and how we arrived here.

Sheila Petty received funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership Development Grant #890-2020-0102, and Government of Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund Grant #NFRF-2021-00161.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/20/film-festivals-take-african-cultural-heritage-around-the-world-and-help-keep-it-alive/