By Ayuko Babu
We have all heard that 2013 was a breakout year for black films, and indeed it was. What isn’t talked about is the role those off-screen and behind the scenes have played in evolving conversations about race in Hollywood, and, most importantly, the representation of African people on film worldwide.
Today, I serve as executive director of the Pan African Film Festival (PAFF), the largest film festival of its kind in the United States. But my background is very rooted in the Civil Rights/Black Power Movements of the 1950s and 1960s. As a student in Los Angeles, I got involved in the Afro-American Association, an offshoot of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that focused on raising black consciousness, specifically on college campuses. Through the Afro-American Association, I met Bobby Seale; Huey Newton; Dr. Maulana Karenga, who created Kwanzaa; and many other noted community leaders who helped me understand the reality of our condition as African people. What we could do to change it through the popular medium of film became my focus.
Back then, movies like Black Orpheus and Nothing But a Man had a powerful impact on us. I grew up in Cheyenne, Wyoming and with only a mere 2,000 black people in the metro area, like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, people of color were rarely seen. So, I knew firsthand what a lifeline entertainment, particularly cinema, was becoming to us as a community. So, when the idea of PAFF sprung from Festival Panafricain du Cinéma de Ouagadougou (Pan African Film Festival of Ouagadougou or FESPACO), I was all in. FESPACO, started in 1969 and validated with a government decree in 1972, is the continent’s largest consistent cultural event, held biennially in Burkina Faso, and welcomes films from all over Africa. It is the most important Diaspora film festival in the world. Top officials there suggested we create a similar festival in America. From the movement, we learned timing is everything. And the time came in 1992 after the L.A. Riots. Using that momentum, we launched our first PAFF in October 1992 at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in Los Angeles, which had been receptive to showcasing independent African cinema. We also got great support from our cofounders, award-winning —that is, award-winning actors Danny Glover and Ja’net DuBois [best known as Willona from Good Times]—who continue to support us to this day.
From the onset of PAFF, African filmmakers adamantly advised us to make sure these films played to the community and not be tucked away in libraries and museums. In February 1996, the festival settled into the first theatre in Baldwin Hills near Crenshaw Boulevard, our longtime home. The Magic Johnson Theatre’s location within the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza allowed great access to the community. Our ability to engage people is one of the most important contributions we have made in helping to bring about change in Hollywood.
Typically, when independent filmmakers need money to put behind their films, they look to film festivals to show distributors that there is an audience for their work. The problem with Sundance, Tribeca and the New York Film Festival is that there is no significant black audience there; so a distributor can’t get a good sense of how black folks feel about certain films. At Sundance and other more mainstream festivals, we are the periphery not the center. At film festivals like PAFF, we make our stories the center. So when distributors and other Hollywood decision makers attend PAFF, the American Black Film Festival, the African Diaspora Film Festival and others like us, they get to see what a broad spectrum of black folks, from seniors to young people, think about the film. And that’s how we’ve influenced that process.
When the South African film Tsotsi won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2006, we were credited for part of its success because we generated interest in it. Over the years, we’ve been one of the first outlets for young filmmakers like Kasi Lemmons, Malcolm D. Lee and Gina Prince-Bythewood by showcasing their short films long before they even made successful feature films like Eve’s Bayou, The Best Man and Love & Basketball.
We’ve also recognized rising stars like Idris Elba, who won our Canada Lee Rising Star Award—named for the pioneering Hollywood actor who starred in a variety of films, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat in 1944 and his last film in 1951, Cry, the Beloved Country, also starring Sidney Poitier—long before his acclaimed 2013 role as the great South African leader in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.
From the very beginning, we’ve been committed to showcasing all the voices in the black community, in the black world, that have something to say about experiences that speak to us. When we pick films, we ask: Does it speak to us as a people? Does the film move us? Does it enrich us? Does it entertain us? Does it enlighten us? Does it inform us? We are not interested in the films that try to tell other people about us.
The theme of this year’s festival was: Sharing Our World. And we did that with 172 films, representing 46 countries around the globe—including Argentina, Brazil, Bahamas, Canada, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Italy, Jamaica, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, and of course, the United States. At this year’s festival we had Stanley Nelson’s Freedom Summer, which takes us back to Mississippi in 1964 during a pivotal moment of the Civil Rights Movement. Also, we had the Nollywood comedies The Meeting and Confusion Na Wa. There’s also the powerful documentary Cuba: An African Odyssey, which shows why, when Nelson Mandela was released from prison, Fidel Castro was the first person he visited outside the continent.
Plus, we spotlight About Last Night, produced by Will Packer, which stars Kevin Hart and Michael Ealy in a Hollywood remake of a Rob Lowe and Demi Moore film. Our closing film was Blackbird, directed by Patrik-Ian Polk, which tells the story of a young gay boy coming of age in Mississippi, and stars Mo’Nique and Isaiah Washington.
No one group of black people anywhere has a monopoly on information and knowledge about us. Everybody’s got a piece of the puzzle. We have to listen to all of it. It’s not just in New York or in Lagos. When we listen to all the stories, we begin to put the puzzle of understanding together. Hollywood doesn’t get it, but we do. We know that film has the power to change how we see ourselves and maybe even how we treat each other.
So every year, not just 2013, is a breakout black film year for us.