MESSAGE FROM THE DIRECTORS

Welcome to the fifth annual Real Life Documentary Film Festival!

This year we offer our audiences a broad selection of documentaries directed by brilliant filmmakers from Africa and its Diaspora. These intriguing and innovative films will take us through different lenses and aesthetics that reflect the vitality with which the filmmakers engage history and culture as crafted and lived by people of African heritage worldwide. Each filmmaker will use their work to shed light on the changes and dynamics of our daily lives and the political and cultural environments we engage with.

This year our selection focuses on heroisms as the films reveal varieties of militant figures or communities asserting and fighting for their rights and recognition in Africa, North and South America. The films make us, the audiences, witnesses to the engaging determination, vision, resistance and hope by Africans and African Diasporic subjects and communities.

In addition to the films showcased, audiences will experience panel discussions with filmmakers, professionals and scholars from Africa and abroad. The screenings and discussions will take us through a contemporary history of African and African Diasporic cinema as tools for visual literacy and as sites for political and artistic representations.

Over the last five years, Real Life Documentary Film Festival has offered prestigious prizes to highly deserving films. The prizes are the Walter Mosley Award, the Afro Pop Prize and since last year — the Joe Ampah Young Filmmaker’s award. We will continue such traditions this year.

We extend our deep appreciation to our partners and audiences for their long standing commitment and faith in our mission to support a community of artists, scholars and professionals who embody diversity, innovation and uniqueness of vision through filmmaking. We implore you to see as many films, engage the filmmakers and commentators as we bring you another year of exciting films!

Lydie Diakhate and Awam Amkpa
Founders and Directors of the Real Life Documentary Festival