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Presenting the Diversity of Africa

Film Festival “AFRIKAMERA” brings recent movies from Africa to Berlin

August 08th, 2017
Johanna Wohlfrom, News from Berlin
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The 2017 AFRIKAMERA film festival is putting the promotion of the exchange and relations between selected film festivals and film schools in Germany and the African countries in the spotlight. The festival will take place from the 13th till the 19th of November this year.
 

The aim of the film festival “Afrikamera” is to promote the presence of the contemporary African film production seeking to counter the lack of awareness towards the German capital Berlin. The nonprofit cultural association, “toucouler e.V.”, has been engaged since 2007 in an intercultural dialogue between Africa and Germany and they have made an important contribution to its progressive development. In this context, the current cinema from Africa, is experiencing an upswing and the film festivals and film production are playing a much bigger roll than a few years ago.

In the last decades, an increasing number of festivals and film schools were founded and they built a permanent platform for young African filmmakers to develop new visions of the African cinema and then to realize these visions. Moreover, it can also be seen as a venue for exchange between filmmakers, producers and distributors. This continuous development relevant to the media and art is unique in the German-African film and media landscape and it already possesses a solid transnational network and a big media presence.

With annually changing thematic focuses, the festival addresses different issues in which young filmmakers of Africa are interested to work on, cooperating with film festivals ranging from Marrakesh to Durban. It presents the overwhelming diversity of the African continent, consisting not only of the “typical” problems, such as violence, crimes and diseases to the moviegoers of Berlin. These stereotypical images and opinions regarding to the continent will be contrasted by the diverse facets of the actual everyday life in Africa and were made noticeable for the cinema audience.

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