Film at Lincoln Center and African Film Festival, Inc. celebrate the kickoff of the 30th New York African Film Festival (NYAFF) at FLC

The festival presents more than 30 films from more than 15 countries that invite audiences to explore the infinite realms of African and diaspora storytelling and embrace its visionary, probing and fearless spirit.

Schedule:
Wednesday, May 10, 2023
6:30pm: Xale
Awa, a 15-year-old schoolgirl, is happily living her teenage years alongside her twin brother, Adama, who dreams of Europe. When their grandmother dies, their Aunt Fatou and Uncle Atoumane promise to marry in order to preserve the family union. But Fatou does not love Atoumane and the latter, tired of waiting to consummate his marriage, commits an act from which there is no going back. This film is the third in Moussa Sène Absa’s trilogy focused on women

Location: Walter Reade Theater

Thursday, May 11, 2023
4:00pm: Xale
Awa, a 15-year-old schoolgirl, is happily living her teenage years alongside her twin brother, Adama, who dreams of Europe. When their grandmother dies, their Aunt Fatou and Uncle Atoumane promise to marry in order to preserve the family union. But Fatou does not love Atoumane and the latter, tired of waiting to consummate his marriage, commits an act from which there is no going back. This film is the third in Moussa Sène Absa’s trilogy focused on women

6:15pm: A Daughter’s Tribute to Her Father: Souleymane Cissé
An intimate portrayal of the life and career of Souleymane Cissé, one of Africa’s most celebrated filmmakers. The film traces the Malian director’s trajectory from his formative years in Bamako to the present day, through interviews with Cissé and those who knew him best. It celebrates his groundbreaking films and highlights their enduring relevance.

8:30pm: Shorts Program 1: Call and Response
Okem
August Visitor
Africans with Mainframes
Silsilad
Mother’s Tongue
A Laundry Day
Grace

Location: Francesca Beale Theater

Friday, May 12, 2023
4:00pm: A Daughter’s Tribute to Her Father: Souleymane Cisse
An intimate portrayal of the life and career of Souleymane Cissé, one of Africa’s most celebrated filmmakers. The film traces the Malian director’s trajectory from his formative years in Bamako to the present day, through interviews with Cissé and those who knew him best. It celebrates his groundbreaking films and highlights their enduring relevance.

6:00pm: Den Muso
A mute girl’s life takes a dramatic turn when she is raped and, as a result, impregnated. Her family is at once plunged into chaos. The film not only explores the repercussions of her assault but also shines a light on the societal and economic challenges that women dealt with in urban Mali during the 1970s. It is a poignant and thought-provoking portrayal of the difficulties that women continue to face in many parts of the world today.

8:30pm: Shimoni
After seven years in prison, 35-year-old Geoffrey (Justin Mirichii) is released into the care of a Catholic priests’ compound in Shimoni, a small and sleepy village in rural Kenya. As we discover, Geoffrey knows this place-all too well-as “the pit.” A revered English teacher before his time inside, he now does farmyard chores, attends church services as required, and maintains a distance from other residents. Not that he ever goes anywhere else; some unnamed fear prevents him from stepping outside the gate. Then a man with a distinctive patch of white hair appears, terrifying Geoffrey so much that he wets himself. Weru (Daniel Njoroge) has haunted Geoffrey’s dreams for decades. Now he can’t face him. Film editor Angela Wanjiku’s gripping directorial debut explores the ways in which memory and emotion seize control of the body, which in turn may speak when words fail.

Location: Francesca Beale Theater

7:30pm: Free Talk: In Conversation with Souleymane Cissé
One of the living greats of cinema, Souleymane Cissé is known for catapulting African film to the world stage with Yeelen, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes in 1987 and became the first African movie to be awarded at the festival. Over a long career, the Malian filmmaker, now 82, has pioneered an original, uncompromising style of realism and incisive social critique through films like Den Muso (1975), the first feature to made in the Malian language of Bambara; Baara (1977) which won the Etalon de Yennenga at FESPACO; and Waati, which was screened in Competition at Cannes in 1995. A beacon of inspiration for artists worldwide, Cissé has also dedicated his career to supporting African filmmaking through initiatives such as the Union of West African Cinema and Audiovisual Designers, which he founded. NYAFF30 is pleased to welcome Cissé to this year’s festival for retrospective screenings of Yeelen and Den Muso, and a special keynote talk about his career and legacy.

Location: Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center - Amphitheater

Saturday, May 13, 2023
11:30am: Master Class with Moussa Sène Absa
Acclaimed Senegalese filmmaker Moussa Sène Absa will be presenting a master class on Saturday, May 13 in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater.

The class probes the impact of migration on familial and community bonds and takes particular care to examine the perspectives of the mothers of migrants, who often provide the fare for passage. Within a global context, this masterclass will assess African cinema’s response to the question of “Who truly is welcome at havens’ shores?”

Click here for RSVP

Location: Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center - Amphitheater

1:00pm: Yeelen
Set in a timeless past, Yeelen recounts the mythic tale of a power struggle between father and son. Soma Diarra, the jealous father and member of a feared Bambara secret society, plots to kill his son and rival, Nianankoro. Highly stylized and deliberately paced, Yeelen forces the viewer to navigate fundamental oppositions: change and tradition, life and death, light and darkness. Inspired by the classic oral literature of the Mande, Souleymane Cissè traces the circle of time and shows us that the origin and the end are one and the same.

4:00pm: Colette and Justin
Born in Kinshasa and living in Paris, filmmaker Alain Kassanda embodies the classic immigrant dual identity: in the Democratic Republic of Congo he is seen as French, while in France he is seen as Congolese. Determined to understand the colonial legacy from which he comes, Kassanda convinces his maternal grandparents-Colette and Justin-to sit for a series of interviews. Together, they watch old news footage, remember a visit from the Belgian king, and recall what life was like as part of the nascent Black bourgeoisie who served the colonial administration. But Colette and Justin is more than a film about family reminiscences. Kassanda uses a wealth of black-and-white archival footage to tell the story, superimposing his own thoughts and his grandparents’ voices over the visuals-in effect, using the colonizers’ images against them. (He generally avoids footage of the horrors, focusing instead on daily life.) Kassanda, we learn, has two heroes: Justin and inaugural Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba, who was murdered by secessionists in collusion with Belgium. In the course of making Colette and Justin, he realizes their lives were intertwined far more deeply than he knew.

6:30pm: Hyperlink
A Christian convert is preparing for his rebirth as a man of god-unaware that his teenage daughter, who hasn’t heard from him in three months, has declared him dead on social media. A schoolgirl sees her private life made public when she invites a classmate, who is an online influencer, to her home. A divorced man with financial troubles so wants to show his young daughter he can be a good father that he fails to see the precarious position he is maneuvering himself into. And a poet and commentator risks losing herself and those she loves in her desire to use her fame to achieve social change. In four short films, young South African filmmakers reflect on the seductive, and at times treacherous, illusory reality of the internet. Using humor, suspense, and social criticism, this collective production sketches a society dominated by idealized projections of the dreamt self.

8:30pm: Our Lady of the Chinese Shop
When a Chinese merchant brings to a neighborhood of Luanda a peculiar holy plastic figure of Our Lady, a mourning mother seeks peace, a committed barber starts a new cult, and a stray kid looks for revenge for his lost friend. This delicate urban tale reveals a family and city full of resentment, greed, and torment.

Location: Francesca Beale Theater

Sunday, May 14, 2023
2:00pm: Money, Freedom, a Story of CFA Franc
The year 1960 marked the end of the colonial empires across the African continent. France disappeared from the map, leaving behind a colonial creation, the CFA Franc, a currency that still circulates in almost all of France’s former territories south of the Sahara. Why did those countries never denounce this strange legacy after they regained their freedom? The film delves into a little-known story that started in the 19th century and continues to the present time.

5:00pm: With Peter Bradley
When filmmaker Alex Rappoport met then-79-year-old abstract artist Peter Bradley in the winter of 2020, Bradley hadn’t sold many paintings nor had a major show in over four decades – yet he still painted every day in a shipping container studio heated by a wood stove. Over time, the pair recorded Peter’s fascinating story, seemingly overlooked in art history. Bradley was the first Black haute art dealer in New York; likely the first Black abstract artist represented by a major New York gallery; and curator of what is considered the first integrated modern art show in America. Talented, willful, and arrogant, Bradley lived life to its fullest – until he fell upon hard times in the 1980s that nearly ended his career.

At once an intimate portrait and a deep study of the creative process, With Peter Bradley is situated entirely at the artist’s rural home and studio and unfolds over the course of changing seasons. The sole figure on screen, Bradley narrates his life in a series of conversations: often provocative, sometimes bitter, and full of surprises.  We meet the artist at a critical juncture – deeply committed to the expressive power of color, painting gorgeous pictures at a prolific pace, but without an audience to appreciate them. Despite this lack of recognition, the film is buoyed by Peter’s exuberant spirit and warm sense of humor.

7:30pm: Know Your Place
Know Your Place is a slice-of-life drama set in present-day Seattle. Robel (a 15-year-old Eritrean-American) and his best friend, Ethiopian-American Fahmi, embark on a journey to drop off a suitcase containing medicine and cash with a friend traveling back to Eritrea because of a family member’s sudden illness. An unexpected turn transmutes Robel’s simple errand into an odyssey across the rapidly gentrifying city; in the process he navigates directions to make his delivery on time, along with the challenges of familial responsibility, self-identification, and dislocation amid the ongoing redevelopment and displacement of the only community he’s ever known as home.

Location: Francesca Beale Theater

Monday, May 15, 2023
3:30pm: Our Lady of the Chinese Shop
When a Chinese merchant brings to a neighborhood of Luanda a peculiar holy plastic figure of Our Lady, a mourning mother seeks peace, a committed barber starts a new cult, and a stray kid looks for revenge for his lost friend. This delicate urban tale reveals a family and city full of resentment, greed, and torment.

5:45pm: Shimoni
After seven years in prison, 35-year-old Geoffrey (Justin Mirichii) is released into the care of a Catholic priests’ compound in Shimoni, a small and sleepy village in rural Kenya. As we discover, Geoffrey knows this place-all too well-as “the pit.” A revered English teacher before his time inside, he now does farmyard chores, attends church services as required, and maintains a distance from other residents. Not that he ever goes anywhere else; some unnamed fear prevents him from stepping outside the gate. Then a man with a distinctive patch of white hair appears, terrifying Geoffrey so much that he wets himself. Weru (Daniel Njoroge) has haunted Geoffrey’s dreams for decades. Now he can’t face him. Film editor Angela Wanjiku’s gripping directorial debut explores the ways in which memory and emotion seize control of the body, which in turn may speak when words fail.

8:00pm: Cordelia
Adapted from the eponymous novel by Nigerian author and poet Femi Osofisan, Cordelia is a romantic period-drama where romance meets politics. This novella starts with a lecturer in a disturbed state about his marriage, which is resulting in an inability to teach his students. One of them later confronts him in his office about his shoddy lecture, and the student in question is accompanied to the lecturer’s office by another student named Cordelia. But little does our lecturer know that Cordelia is about to be at the center of a major riot at the institution.

Location: Francesca Beale Theater

Tuesday, May 16, 2023
4:00pm: Hyperlink
A Christian convert is preparing for his rebirth as a man of god-unaware that his teenage daughter, who hasn’t heard from him in three months, has declared him dead on social media. A schoolgirl sees her private life made public when she invites a classmate, who is an online influencer, to her home. A divorced man with financial troubles so wants to show his young daughter he can be a good father that he fails to see the precarious position he is maneuvering himself into. And a poet and commentator risks losing herself and those she loves in her desire to use her fame to achieve social change. In four short films, young South African filmmakers reflect on the seductive, and at times treacherous, illusory reality of the internet. Using humor, suspense, and social criticism, this collective production sketches a society dominated by idealized projections of the dreamt self.

6:00pm: Shorts Program 2: Freeforms
A collection of poetic, daring and stylistic shorts that take us on a contemplative emotional journey.
By Water
Buzz
Hématome
He’s Dead Now
The Truth About Alvert, the Last Dodo
Yuri
Grief Is the Glitch
Aare

8:45pm: Dent pour Dent
In this comedic drama, Idrissa lives in the suburbs of Dakar, Senegal. As a result of budgetary restrictions imposed by the IMF, then headed by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, he lost his job as a civil servant. Since then, Idrissa has been looking for work, without success. His pride as an African man is all the more affected by the fact that he is now entirely dependent on his wife, Viviane, who somehow manages to support the family through her medical practice. Aminata (Idrissa and Viviane’s daughter) and Moussa, two young students in love with each other, also see their lives disrupted by the economic situation imposed on the country. After yet another humiliation, Idrissa, who holds Strauss-Kahn responsible for his misfortune, decides to go and see a marabout to prepare his revenge…

Location: Francesca Beale Theater

Date: May 10 - 16, 2023

Location:

Tickets
$17 - General Public
$14 - Students, Seniors, and Persons with Disabilities
$12 - Member
$79 - All Access Pass
$39 - Student All Access Pass

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