I’m only just now becoming aware of this… I’ll certainly be tracking it from here on to see what comes of meeting… Glad to see Danny Glover leading the charge in the spirit of Pan-Africanism:
September 12,2011. U.S. actor Danny Glover will lead a large delegation of filmmakers from Africa and the Caribbean to participate in a meeting in Havana on audiovisual production in those regions and their cultural ties and identity. Organized by the Office of the Traveling Caribbean Film Festival, the event will meet next week at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, with debates, panel discussions and presentations on the aesthetic and narrative components of the films in both territories. At a press conference on Thursday, the Cuban filmmaker Rigoberto Lopez, who is the president of the festival, said it will be a unique moment to establish a dialogue that fosters a real prospect of collaboration.
The meeting is part of the Year of African Descent declared by UNESCO and will include topics such as the participation of women in African and Caribbean film, the role of media in building the identity of children and adolescents, and the search for alternatives for the distribution and exhibition of films.
More than 40 filmmakers, academics and specialists from the African continent and countries like USA, Brazil, Ecuador, Panama, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Aruba and Barbados will attend the meeting.
I should note that Glover was in Cuba in June to support a regional workshop entitled Cuba and the Afro-Descendant Peoples of the Americas, a UNICEF-sponsored event.
Also, happening in conjunction and in relation to the event, an African Cinema Festival will take place for the first time in the capital, as well as in another 11 cities of the island. 16 feature films from 12 countries will be shown, including Un Homme Qui Crie (A Screaming Man) by Chadian Mahamat Saleh Haroun (a film title and director we’ve talked about a bit on S&A), and Bamako by Mauritanian filmmaker Adberrahmane Sissako (also previously covered on S&A).
Haroun will be in attendance by the way.
Rubbing elbows with the likes of Hugo Chavez and Castro must make Glover a very popular man in certain US government departments 🙂
