The New York African Film Festival’s 5th Annual African Mini “Video” Film Festival took place December 2, 2000. It was again held at the Bob Marley Theatre in association with a newly formed group, Friends of Liberty Hall, that has taken on the responsibility of re-establishing Marcus Garvey’s Liberty Hall in Kingston.

The Bob Marley Theatre opened its doors in 1996 with the first installation of this festival, which was cosponsored by Tuff Gong Pictures and AFF. Because of the overwhelming response to this event, we decided to make this an annual event. In Jamaica, we are predominantly of African descent. There are certainly more surviving mores and expressions of African culture and a very strong identification of Jamaicans with Africa. Examples of such identifications are seen in our music, dance, language, and cuisine.

This year the festival was proud to screen Malian director Abderrahmane Sissako’s timely La vie sur terre / Life on Earth, which is a poetic meditation on Africa at the beginning of the new millennium. He depicts a fictional documentary of a day in the life of Sokolo, his father’s dusty village near the border of Mali and Mauritania, “where life on earth² is still conducted on foot, by donkey cart, or on bicycle. Audiences were also treated to the screening of the very last film made by legendary Senegalese director, Djibril Diop Mambety, titled La petite vendeuse de Soleil / The Little Girl Who Sold The Sun. In this hymn to the courage of street children, Mambety documents the tenacity and fortitude of a little paraplegic girl, who despite the taunts of others, makes a living selling Senegal’s national newspaper, the Sun. Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno’s offering, Afrique Je Te Plumerai, deconstructs the last 100 years of his country’s colonial history by analyzing everything from old French newsreels to current Cameroonian television. Finally, audiences were treated to Malian director, Adama Drabo’s Taafe Fanga / Skirt Power, a sly comedy about gender roles that is set against the majestic cliffs of Dogon country.

Despite torrential downpours, audiences anticipating the festival fought the rain to attend the screenings. To us this confirms our feeling that the people of Kingston are really in need of more programming like the kind this festival provides. While resort towns in the Caribbean usually have the opportunity of hosting larger film festivals, we aim to provide Kingston audiences the same access to quality films. Also, by seeing how Black filmmakers from Africa have overcome huge hurdles to make their own work, the festival will excite Jamaicans to further develop their own filmmaking capabilities. The need for the development of an indigenous film industry continues to get little focus, and it has therefore become critical that the efforts of AFF/NYcontinue as interest and support grow each year.