Our Archive Since 2006
A Message from the Directors and Producers for the festival 2009
“ Le moindre mouvement dans la complexité, une chanson, un poème, le tressaillement d’un peuple, exalte infiniment le tout et fait liaison avec le plus petit détail. La conscience s’élargit. L‘imaginaire s’étend. Alors cette conscience du Tout-monde demande a être déclarée, ou reconnue, en termes de politiques et de poétiques.”
“The slightest movement done into complexity, a song, a poem, the tremulous of the people, infinitely exalts the whole and make the link with the smaller detail. The consciousness becomes wilder. The imaginary spreads over. So, this consciousness of the Tout-monde has to be declared, or recognized, in terms of politics and poetics.”
Edouard Glissant / Patrick Chamoiseau
« L’intraitable beauté du monde. Adresse à Barack Obama »
Editions Galaade, 2009
This epigraph from Edouard Glissant – one of the world’s prominent writer and philosopher of the 20th and 21st century— underscores the role of artists in societies and the aim of Real Life Pan-African Documentary Festival in amplifying the place of African visions in the world and its art forms. Each artist and each cultural actor is part of this infinitesimal movement that makes the world different and more luminous.
The production of documentaries has increased with remarkable success all over the world, bringing varieties of new imageries and esthetics to our screens. Documentaries are no more enclosed in one genre but offer a variety of gazes and expressions. New technologies and new media continue to encourage a rich creativity within which images encounter and interpret real life. Real Life Pan-African Documentary Festival is glad to contribute to these important changes in contemporary cinema and the visual field.
So far, the festival with this 4thedition has showcased 200 films, and brought together filmmakers from over 15 African countries, Haiti, Jamaica, France, England, Germany and the United States. Our objective is to stimulate Africans to document their own histories while exchanging film vocabularies, methods and contexts with filmmakers from Africa and other continents.
The festival has embraced three focal points since its inception. First, it provides a forum for showcasing innovative and historical documentaries on African and African diasporic communities and issues. Moreover, with the West African Documentary Forum, it seeks to shape the training of younger generations of filmmakers, particularly in Africa and to develop a digital archiving and preservation program in Accra. Furthermore, the festival has initiated a visual literacy campaign among high school students by training them in photography and basic documentary skills.
To keep these perspectives vivid, we intend to expand our program to encompass high school teachers and students, and young filmmakers in film schools from several African countries, as well as integrating African television stations. Thanks to the great support of our local and international partners, they enabled us make our festival a major platform for documentary filmmaking in Africa. We seek to gather all competences and expertise to build long-term projects and perspectives for the Real Life Documentary Festival and visual arts.
For the next 2 years, a grant from the European Community will help us create a network with 3 other festivals: Dockanema in Mozambique, Zanzibar International Film Festival in Tanzania and the Festival de Cine Africano de Tarifa in Spain. The objective is to sustain the promotion and the diffusion of documentaries from Africa, Carribean and Pacific countries.
As we have done every year within the last four years, we hope to address your curiosity by offering a selection of films that privileges new visual languages and subject matters from African and its Diaspora. All the documentaries in the program are selected for the 2 awards The Walter Mosley Award and the The AfroPop Prize. The 2009 selection will focus on historical works and advocacy films contesting varieties of social exclusion.
We continue to be grateful to the people of Ghana for enabling this Pan-African project--which provides a forum for citizens from all over the world to congregate in this hallowed land of Pan-African history. We welcome you to attend our numerous screenings and conferences at our venues: the Alliance Française, the Goethe Institut, Gama Executive Theatre, NAFTI and Nkrumah Circle, and share with us our enthusiasm to be part of this movement into telling and sharing our own stories with the rest of the world.
