Deutsche - Global Balance

146. Africa in Motion film festival and symposium
Grossbritanien
Africa in Motion (AiM) is an African film festival taking place annually in Edinburgh, Scotland.
2009 was the 4 th edition of the festival, currently the biggest African film festival in the UK.
Every year, the festival screens dozens of African films from all over the continent,
accompanied by a range of complementary events such as directors masterclasses,
workshops for children and African music performances. The main aim of the festival is to
bring the best of African cinema to UK audiences.
The challenge we set ourselves in 2009 was to bring our audiences films that might be
difficult in topic and style, but that ultimately show the true independence of African politics
and African arts. As 2009 is the UN International Year of Reconciliation, we focused on
films representing trauma and reconciliation in a pan-African context. Of all the truth
commissions in the world, almost half were established in African countries. This not only
says something about the consequences of colonialism and the devastating nature of
conflicts in Africa, but also points towards the possibilities of contextualised and effective
ways of coming to terms with these events, overcoming traumas attached to war and
oppression and building a future with confidence and certainty.
Dealing with and overcoming traumas is about filling the gaps where devastating events have
left blank spaces in memory. Storytelling and filmmaking can do the same: where
historiography has fallen short or deliberately left gaps in our collective memories, art and
film can contribute to fill these gaps by turning to individual stories. The truth commissions all
over Africa have been a reinforcement of that. Films about individual traumas, personal
stories and subjective experiences have managed to successfully re-evaluate the national
and international collective memory by providing answers and asking the right questions
where history could not.
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