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The Cambridge African Film Festival, now going into its sixth year, has had two chief aims over the past years that it has been running. First of all, it aims to provide UK audiences with access to a culturally diverse pool of feature and documentary film, and art and information on Africa and on issues of race, that they would otherwise never have the opportunity to see and be engaged with. In its commitment to actually bringing African filmmakers to the UK, to introduce their films and lead discussions with audiences, the festival is particularly interested in encouraging dialogue between people of different national, cultural, ethnic and class backgrounds. Secondly, the festival provides a service for African, black, and diasporic filmmakers (i.e. filmmakers of African origin, or African filmmakers based in the UK) who would otherwise struggle to find distribution for their films. As we all know well, having a film produced does not mean that it will necessarily achieve distribution, and films by Africans and by black people in general have notoriously been overlooked by distributors and exhibitors. It is our belief that these films need to be shown and seen by audiences in the UK if we are to continue to build an intelligent and compassionate community, committed to helping to reduce racism, poverty, and discrimination of all kinds. Moreover, intelligent, reflective or positive representations and considerations of Africa are rare, in cinema and in the media in general. The Festival's aim has always been to challenge perceptions of Africa as only a war-torn, damaged continent, by presenting positive images of Africa, as well as important educational films that deal with, for example, poverty, the AIDS crisis in Africa, and the problem of girls' education.
In recent years the structure and aims of the Festival have changed slightly. Firstly, we have broadened our programme to include films made by diasporic filmmakers, and also to include events that do not only encompass cinema. We have also run educational workshops for children, African music events, an African poetry event, and an exhibition of a young South African photographer's work, as well as presenting the festival itself and the academic Symposium which has become a feature of the festival. We hope to expand these kinds of educational and cultural events in years to come.
We have shifted from a ten-day long festival to an event that runs for one month, over four consecutive weekends. This decision was taken in order to create an event that more people would be able to attend; we are pleased with the resultant core audiences that we have been able to build up over the four weekends of the festival. |
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