Actualités

Exclusive: WME has signed writer-director Merawi Gerima and cinematographer Mark Jeevaratnam for representation in all areas. Gerima and Jeevaratnam are part of the filmmaking team behind Residue, a feature film that premiered at this year’s Slamdance Film Festival and was a 2020 Venice Film Festival selection.

Gerima wrote, directed, and produced the drama– his debut feature — which follows aspiring filmmaker Jay (Obinna Nwachukwu) who returns to his neighborhood in Washington, D.C. — but it looks different. It is gentrified beyond recognition. Dealing with alienation from his friends, troubled by the disappearance of a loved one and unsure of his place in this new community, Jay confronts issues of identity, isolation and loss on a tumultuous personal journey.

Residue was named one of the New Yorker’s best films of 2020 and was picked up for distribution by Ava DuVernay’s Array label.

Gerima, who has an Mfa degree from USC School of Cinematic Arts,...

Shirikiana Aina says premiere of her film in Rotterdam is ‘ironic’.

Source: Iffr

Shirikiana Aina

At International Film Festival Rotterdam (Iffr) this week, filmmaker Shirikiana Aina has called on the Netherlands to acknowledge its colonialist past.

The director points out that one of the dungeons in Ghana spoken about in her film, Footsteps Of Pan Africanism, was called ”Fort Amsterdam.”

“It was the dungeon where Africans were held for months and months and months, sometimes for up to a year, along with other “goods” to be stored there for these ships from the Netherlands to take them off to slavery.”

Aina welcomes Iffr’s Pan-African Cinema Today (Pact) programme. “I think it is also very significant that it is in the middle of Holland which had such a huge and determining impact on the past and future of Africa. Their colonial presence was devastating. I don’t know if Holland has ever taken the time to look at...

At the Rotterdam’s Reality Check conference, global experts including veteran filmmaker Haile Gerima talk about how to reach diverse audiences.

Source: Tiff

‘Tuko Macho’

George Gachara of Kenya’s groundbreaking multidisciplinary arts group The Nest Collective said filmmakers and distributors need to think more about serving the audience and its desires rather than imposing films on them.

It should be easy for the audience to engage with content, he said: “Anyone who wants to see our films, whether that’s the basic audience or the industry screening that you dress up for, those are both important audiences, those people all have 1,000 things to otherwise see or do,” he said today at the Reality Check distribution conference at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

“Whether it’s the granny in the cinema or the Netflix crowd, they have a lot of things competing for your attention for their cash, for their entertainment time. I want to make...