The New York African Film Festival (NYAFF) is traveling throughout New York City, bringing the best of African cinema — as well as African filmmakers — to the Big Apple! Having completed stops at the Africa Center, Film at Lincoln Center and the Maysles Documentary Center, the festival is pulling into BAM (the Brooklyn Academy of Music) during the wildly popular DanceAfrica festival. There NYAFF is known as FilmAfrica and will bring BAM Rose Cinemas an incredible array of 51 features and shorts films with genres ranging from experimental to mockumentary to comedy. Opening Night will be the North American premiere of So Long a Letter (2025), a cinematic adaptation by Angèle Diabang of Mariama Ba’s critically acclaimed novel from the 70s. I’m writing to see if you can attend or if you can remotely do a preview/piece about the festival/films.
Other highlights at BAM include: Katanga: The Dance of the Scorpions, the winner of the 2025 Étalon d’or de Yennenga (Golden Stallion of Yennenga) — the top prize at the Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO). From Mozambique, DanceAfrica ’s guest country, is that nation’s first-ever feature film, Memories, Murder and Massacre (1979), the revolutionary classic Kuxa Kanema (2003) and a contemporary documentary The Night Still Smells Like Gunpowder (2024). The Oscar-nominated film Soundtrack to a Coup D’etat (2024) and Sundance Grand Jury Prize nominee Khartoum (2025), will all be screened. The closing film, The Night Still Smells of Gunpowder (2024), is an ode to peace after turbulent times. Languages include English, Swahili, French, Arabic, Wolof, Portuguese and more!
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Africa is where humans first started expressing ourselves visually. And we’ll also have the world premiere of a collection of films commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art from award-winning Ethiopian American filmmaker Sosena Solomon for the reimagined African Galleries of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing ahead of its opening on Saturday, May 31. (Solomon had to climb up rock formations for 45 minutes to 2.5 hours to get to the shoot locations for some of these films.)
NYAFF, which began the first day of May, runs at BAM through Thursday, May 29, and concludes with a free screening at St. Nicholas Park on Saturday, May 31.
See the free schedule – https://nyaff32.eventive.org/schedule
Check out a trailer for the festival here:
