Event detail

African Film Festival 2019

Film - Series | March 2 – May 10, 2019 every day |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

March 2–May 10, 2019

This year’s edition of the African Film Festival highlights the best of both new African cinema and films of the black diaspora. We pay tribute to the great director Bill Gunn—also an actor, playwright, and novelist—with new restorations of two genre-benders, his radical horror film Ganja & Hess and his “meta–soap opera” Personal Problems. The latter was conceived by Ishmael Reed, who will be in attendance at the screening. Other special programs include a new restoration of Djibril Diop Mambéty’s second feature film, Hyenas, a loose, biting adaptation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s satire The Visit. Women directors take center stage with new documentaries and narrative films from Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Niger, the United Kingdom, and the United States, depicting people who stretch social norms—female car mechanics, male fashion designers, childless women, a reluctant witch, and other dreamers. Two family dramas intimately examine the generation gap, charting a French-African boy’s trip to his ancestral homeland of Burkina Faso and the impact of a young Tunisian man’s departure for Syria on his family. Of related interest: our spring Out of the Vault programs guest curated by The Black Aesthetic.

Event contact:  afox@berkeley.edu, 510-642-0365