Organized by the Caribbean Cinema Traveling Exhibition
Office, the meeting will be held next week at Havana’s Hotel
Nacional de Cuba, with debates, round tables and
presentations on the aesthetic and narrative components of
filmography in these two areas.
During
a press conference on Thursday, Cuban filmmaker Rigoberto
Lopez, president of the event, asserted that it will be a
unique moment to start up exchanges favoring real
cooperation prospects.
The
meeting takes place in the Year of Afro-descendants,
declared by UNESCO, and will include topics like women’s
participation in African and Caribbean cinema; the role of
audiovisuals in the construction of thee identity of
children and adolescents; and the search for alternatives
for the distribution and screening of films.
More
than 40 filmmakers, academicians and specialists from the
entire African continent and countries like the United
States, Brazil, Ecuador, Panama, Mexico, the Dominican
Republic, Aruba and Barbados will attend the event, among
them filmmaker and professor Manthia Diawara, director of
the Institute of African-American Studies of the University
of New York; filmmaker Zozimo Bulbul, director of the Film
Noir Festival in Brazil; and former Culture Minister Cheikh
Omar Sissoko, from Mali.
Also
present will be the president of the Parliament of Suriname,
Jennifer Geerlings Simons; the president of the Association
of filmmakers of Senegal, Manssur Sora Wade; and director
Souleiman Sisse, from Mali.
An
African Cinema Festival, with 16 movies from 12 nations
-among them Bamako, by Mauritanian Adberrahmane Sissako-
will take place for the first time in the capital and in
another 11 cities of the island, parallel to the event.
The
Festival will be inaugurated with the film “El hombre que
grita,” the winner of the Jury’s Special Prize in Cannes
2010, the screening of which will be attended by its
director, Mahamat Saleh Haroun, from Chad.
