The 33rd New York African Film Festival – Part 1

The 33rd New York African Film Festival (NYAFF) will be a month-long cinematic celebration unfolding across New York City throughout May, illuminating stories, histories and visions from Africa and its diasporas.

Spanning theaters, cultural centers, and public spaces, the festival will present more than 100 films from over 30 countries across Africa and its Diasporas. The lineup includes more than 50 feature films and 60 shorts, with many filmmakers in attendance for post-screening conversations. NYAFF is co-presented by the Africa Center, Film at Lincoln Center (FLC), the Maysles Documentary Center, BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) and New York City Parks Department.

Through this year’s theme, “As the Stars Sow the Earth,” the festival celebrates cosmic agents that have sown memory, will, and possibility into Africa and its Diasporas, foregrounding Africa’s long-exploited natural resources while tracing a lineage of leaders and artists who imagine alternative relationships to the Earth. This cosmology resonates with the global rise of independent filmmaking, as directors working from historically underrepresented and underfunded regions use the moving image to reckon with the afterlives of colonialism while sustaining transnational and ecological connections. The 33rd New York African Film Festival affirms that Africa and its Diasporas, as a mobile and resilient geography, people, and idea, have been granted the wisdom, memory, and invention necessary to build sovereign futures.

“Across this year’s selection, filmmakers are reimagining the landscapes we inherit—drawing from ancestral wisdom not as something to leave behind, but as a source of renewal and possibility,” said Mahen Bonetti, founder and Executive Director of AFF. “Many of the directors, including a strong group making their first features, open new ways of seeing, rooted in land, spirit, and the worlds we share. In these films, what sustains us becomes a kind of wealth, guiding how we envision and shape futures on our own terms. Together, they offer glimpses of brighter horizons, reminding us that even in difficult times, life takes root in surprising and extraordinary ways.”

The festival kicks off May 1 at 6:30 p.m. at the Africa Center with a Town Hall forum centered on the theme of “Black Space” — the ongoing transformation of social and physical environments by Black communities toward liberatory futures. Through performances, reflections and conversations, the program will explore how these spaces are forged and sustained, and how ancestral memory, spiritual cosmologies and creative practice shape African and diasporic worlds. Bringing together cultural workers across visual art, land stewardship, and performance, the Town Hall sets the tone for the festival’s broader theme, As the Stars Sow the Earth, which examines how Black communities transform displacement, ecological degradation and historical rupture into sites of possibility.
Panelists and the moderator will be announced at a later date.

On Wednesday, May 6 at 6:30pm, NYAFF holds its Opening Night celebration at FLC featuring the New York premiere of Erige Sehiri’s Promised Sky, a bittersweet drama following an Ivorian pastor living in Tunisia, forming a makeshift family with the young women who find refuge in her home. The film opened the 2025 Cannes Un Certain Regard program and features a stellar cast, including César Award nominee Aïssa Maïga and Laetitia Ky.

The Centerpiece film, from executive producers Barack and Michelle Obama and Oscar-winning director Ben Proudfoot, is The Eyes of Ghana, following 93-year-old photographer Chris Hesse on a quest to rescue an archive of films that could rewrite history. Closing Night will feature Shorts Program 3: The Art of Protection, including Shiloh Tumo Washington’s Bailey’s Blues; Justice Rutikara’s Ibuka, Justice; Catherine E. McKinley, Mamadou Tapily, and Marc Lesser’s Keïta La; Aminata Drynie Bockarie’s Where the Water Meets Us; Nimco Sheikhaden’s Exodus; Klein Ongaki’s The Land Smiles Back; Abdelkrim Boughoud’s Eauquation – Water Distribution at Douiret-Sbâa; and Marwa Eltahir’s 99 Names: My Liberation Is Tied to Yours.

Additional highlights include the world premiere of Gabriel Souleyka’s The Soul of Africa, a captivating documentary exploring the origins, resilience, and contemporary relevance of African spiritual traditions; and the North American premiere of Hamed Mobasser and Yohane Dean Lengol’s Rumba Royale, following a young photographer (Congolese rumba star Fally Ipupa) who becomes entangled in the fragile social world of a legendary rumba nightclub in 1959 Léopoldville.

Two classic film restorations will have their U.S. premieres: Caméra Arabe, Férid Boughedir’s passionate 1987 documentary linking politically engaged Arab cinema from the 1960s onward to major historical events, restored in 4K and followed by a Q&A with Boughedir himself; and a 4K restoration of Paulin Soumanou Vieyra’s 1981 film En résidence surveillée, a biting political satire set in a fictional African state where corruption, media control, and forced exile reveal the human cost of unchecked power.

The festival also features the U.S. premiere of Lace Relations by Anette Baldauf, Chioma Onyenwe, Joana Adesuwa Reiterer, and Katharina Weingartner, a documentary uncovering the history of the textile trade that has intertwined Nigeria and Austria for centuries. Idris Elba’s first short film, Dust to Dreams, about a Lagos nightclub pulsating with aspiring musicians but masking a family drama, is also included in the lineup.

A special event at FLC will feature Férid Boughedir participating in an extended conversation following the screening of his newly restored 1983 film Caméra d’Afrique, inviting audiences into a thoughtful dialogue with one of the defining voices in the history of African cinema.

NYAFF will allow itself a meta moment as it presents 36 Years at NYAFF Digital Exhibition, a digital exhibition showcasing NYAFF’s archival collection, including never-before-seen interviews, discussions, and photographs with a host of pioneering figures and friends of the festival such as Ousmane Sembène, Safi Faye, Bill Greaves, Sarah Maldoror, Harry Belafonte, Rita Marley, Danny Glover, Wole Soyinka, Miriam Makeba, and Ossie Davis. Photographs will be displayed alongside the digital exhibition, documenting the communities brought together through NYAFF’s programs, parties, and events over the years. The exhibition, which runs in the Amphitheater at FLC’s Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, reflects the festival’s origins and its continued growth as New York City’s first African film festival.

At FLC, ticket prices are $19 for the general public; $16 for students, seniors, and persons with disabilities; and $14 for FLC Members. See more and save with a 3+ Film Package ($17 for general public; $14 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $12 for FLC Members), the $89 All-Access Pass, or the $65 Student All-Access Pass. For tickets, visit: https://www.filmlinc.org/. Contact info@africanfilmny.org for information about attending the Opening Night Party.

The festival takes root in Harlem at Maysles Documentary Center from May 15 to 17 with a showcase of powerful documentaries from the Continent and Diaspora. Opening Night will see the U.S. premiere of Irene Tassembedo’s prize-winning film La Traversée (The Crossing), which offers a thoughtful, affecting reflection on migration and the forces — personal, political and economic — that shape it. Camille Varenne’s Wolobougou is a moving portrait of midwife Honorine Soma’s fight to expand care, dignity, and autonomy for women in Burkina Faso. In a nod to the festival’s thematic focus, Reclaiming Cocoa lays bare the inequities of extraction while highlighting efforts to protect and restore African resources for local communities.

Two standout features illuminate extraordinary lives shaped by resistance: Amílcar, a lyrical portrait of revolutionary thinker Amílcar Cabral, whose anti-colonial vision transformed Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, and Miss Jobson, an intimate portrait of the fiercely independent Jamaican lawyer and activist Diane Jobson, Bob Marley’s former attorney, who devoted herself to defending the poor. Thomas Letellier’s documentary Batwing Unmasked: An African Super Hero reveals the story behind Batwing, the groundbreaking DC Comics hero. Together, Record and Until Further Notice trace trans lives in all their complexity — resilient, vulnerable, self-fashioned — with Until Further Notice also bearing the weight of ICE and the threat of forced displacement. For tickets, visit https://www.maysles.org/.

NYAFF settles into Brooklyn’s BAM Rose Cinemas from May 22 to May 28 as FilmAfrica, part DanceAfrica 2026, BAM’s longest running program and the nation’s largest celebration of African diasporic dance, music, and culture. Curated by the African Film Festival, this cinematic companion spotlights the culture and artistry of Uganda presenting a showcase of contemporary and classic Pan-African cinema that highlights the continent’s rich storytelling traditions, social movements, and artistic expression.

At BAM, the selection ranges from foundational works such as Ossie Davis’s 1972 film Black Girl, starring Leslie Uggams, to assured debut features from Olive Nwosu — the 2026 Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Award for Acting Ensemble winner Lady — and Suzannah Mirghani’s Thessaloniki FIlm Festival prize-winning film Cotton Queen. The Opening Night film, the New York premiere of Mohamed Ahmed’s A Tribe Called Love, is a modern-day take on the Romeo and Juliet tale set in Toronto with families from two different Somali tribes. Akinola Davies Jr.’s critically acclaimed My Father’s Shadow — the U.K.’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards — casts a powerful presence over the program.

The lineup also includes a strong slate of Ugandan films, among them Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala, now celebrating its 35th anniversary; Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine’s Memories of Love Returned, a documentary chronicling his more than two-decade effort to preserve the photographs of master photographer Kibaate Aloysius Ssalongo; Loukman Ali’s taut thriller, The Girl in the Yellow Jumper; and Patience Nitumwesiga’s The Woman Who Poked the Leopard, a documentary about medical anthropologist and LGBTQ rights advocate Dr. Stella Nyanzi, who was jailed for speaking out against state repression. BAM Rose Cinemas is located at 30 Lafayette Avenue. For tickets, visit https://www.bam.org/.

Closing the festival on May 30 at 6:30 p.m. at St. Nicholas Park, the outdoor shorts program Exuberant Jubilance brings together vibrant stories from the African continent and diaspora that celebrate resilience, humor, and collective joy. The lineup includes Rachida El Garani’s Rachid, a sharp and heartfelt portrait of a young Moroccan man navigating the job market; Rhys Aaron Lewis’ Run Like We, a warm coming-of-age story set against the excitement of the 2012 London Olympics; Zoé Cauwet’s Le Grand Calao, an intimate and luminous reflection on rest, friendship and freedom in Ouagadougou; Ekwa Msangi’s Soko Sonko, a lively father-daughter comedy set in Kenya; and Kagho Idhebor’s My Jebba Story, a personal visual memoir honoring memory, place and the roots of a storyteller’s journey. Together, these films offer an uplifting close to the festival, inviting audiences to gather outdoors in celebration of community, connection and the richness of Black life across borders.

The programs of AFF are made possible by the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Bradley Family Foundation, Color Congress, NYC & Company, The New York Community Trust, French Cultural Services, Manhattan Portage, Organization de la Francophonie, Essentia Water, Ministre du Tourisme République démocratique du Congo, ZOPMEDIA, South African Consulate General, National Film and Video Foundation, and Motion Picture Enterprises.