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New Orleans Afrikan Film and Art Festival
It is a great pleasure to announce the creation of the New Orleans Afrikan Film and Arts Festival. Given the renown of the City of New Orleans as a site of artistic creativity and its historic ties to Africa and communities of African descent worldwide, the New Orleans Afrikan Film and Art Festival seeks to enhance these bonds by showcasing and exploring the productions of black artists throughout the world in film, music, visual arts and literature.
Each year, with the support of partner festivals and institutions and the collaboration of a range of citizens and students across several New Orleans schools and university campuses, the New Orleans Afrikan Film and Arts Festival will organize a week-long festival of motion pictures from Africa, Brazil and other Latin-American countries, the West Indies, as well as the USA and beyond.
The inaugural festival will take place October 23-30, 2008 and will screen films produced in and focusing on South Africa. It will be dedicated to Nelson Mandela, whom we are inviting to preside over the opening. For several reasons, the theme of South Africa seems particularly apt for the first year: the impact of the regime of apartheid on millions of black people, the extraordinary international struggle to dismantle it and to create a just society, the ongoing legacies of violence, educational and economic inequity, the mythic status of South Africa in the contemporary black imaginary, and finally New Orleans’ sister city relationship with Durban, South Africa.
Please click on the link below. You can then join us in our effort to woo President Mandela to New Orleans in October 2008 by signing our letter of invitation to him.
With sincere thanks,
Eileen Julien : President, New Orleans Afrikan Film and Art Festival Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature Indiana University Bloomington - eileen@neworleansafrikanfilmfest.org
Joseph Gaye Ramaka : Independent Filmmaker Vice-President Festival Director - ramaka@neworleansafrikanfilmfest.org
Contact :
contact@neworleansafrikanfilmfest.org