New York African Film Festival

Now in its 29th year, the New York African Film Festival is back with an in-person gathering at Film at Lincoln Center on Thursday, May 12, to "take a look at the past, while capturing the present pulse and looking forward to envisioning a brighter future." Highlights include Gessica Généus’s feature directorial debut Freda, about a family’s in Haiti longing to escape ever-present violence (with a post-screening discussion with Généus will be hosted by CBS journalists Vladimir Duthiers); Tanzanian filmmaker Amil Shivji’s Tug of War about a rebellious young revolutionary who falls for an Indian-Zanzibari girl escaping an arranged marriage; the U.S. premieres of Charles Castella’s Abderrahmane Sissako, un cinéaste à l'Opéra, on the acclaimed director Sissako’s creation of an opera about the history of Africa at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris and Ahmed Farah’s Ayaanle, about a Kenyan actor who becomes the most wanted man in Kenya; and the New York premieres of Nganji Mutiri’s Juwaa and French actress-director Aïssa Maïga’s documentary Marcher sur l’eau (Above Water). The festival runs there through May 17, then heads to the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem from May 19 to 22. It concludes, as always, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music during Dance Africa (under the name Film Africa) from May 27 to June 2 (which includes the Memorial Day weekend).