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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Thursday, February 16th, 2006 - Comments Off on African Diaspora Film Festival Takes Up Week-Long Brooklyn Residency
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African Diaspora Film Festival Takes Up Week-Long Brooklyn Residency


The Reeler grabbed a quick word a few days ago with Diarah N’Daw-Spech, one of the organizers of New York’s African Diaspora Film Festival. I had caught her in the middle of preparing for the fest’s annual field trip to Brooklyn, where the ADFF’s Best Of series will settle in tomorrow at BAM; needless to say, she was a little busy, but she kindly walked me through the event anyway.
“The Best Of is an opportunity for people to catch up–to see what they couldn’t see or missed out on,” N’Daw-Spech told me. “Or, if they never made it, to really catch the best of what was made available, which is always a nice opportunity.” The ADFF has roots in Brooklyn, in fact, dating back to its inaugural November 1993 go-around split between Park Slope’s Plaza Twin Theater and Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. After 9/11 made the Brooklyn leg logistically impossible in 2001, the festival returned to its Plaza contingent the following February with a smaller program. After that successful test run, the Best Of relocated to the just-renovated BAM Rose Cinemas in 2003.
This year’s series includes 18 films–virtually all features and shorts culled from the 2005 ADFF’s 80-film program. “We still make sure to maintain a diverse representation of what the black experience is,” N’Daw-Spech said. “That’s always something we do when we program the festival–we want to make sure we have representation from as many countries and continents as possible. We have films from Africa, Latin America, Europe, the Caribbean and the US, and that’s something we always try to keep.”


A smattering of this year’s films originated here in New York, including Michèle Stephenson’s award-winning Faces of Change (above), Joe James’s Arthur! A Celebration of Life and John Eisler’s short, Slave Reparations: The Final Passage. (The filmmakers are slated to attend post-screening discussions of each of their projects.) A few other titles screened at previous years’ festivals, while the Oscar-nominated South African film Tsotsi will receive its official New York premiere Feb. 19.
“We saw it at Toronto, and we approached Miramax,” N’Daw-Spech told me. “They wanted to let us show it in the main festival, but by the time they got back to us, there wasn’t enough time. The programming was completed. So we said, ‘We can’t do it for the main festival, but we’d love to have it for the Best Of. And that worked out pretty great.” The ADFF instead wound up programming IFC Films’ Manderlay, the incendiary Lars Von Trier film indicting racism in America. Star Danny Glover accompanied the picture to its early-December screening. “Some major distributors finally see that it makes sense for certain films to go into these specialized festivals, where they get visibility for a film (among) an audience that otherwise probably would not have been aware of the film. That’s something that’s new, and it gives the opportunity for quite a variation. And everybody benefits.”
The Best Of might not be the international event that its source festival–with between 30 and 40 directors attending from around the world–has become. Nevertheless, by virtue of that source, it inherits one of New York more intensely diverse annual programs. “Over the years we’ve had people even from where you think might be strange places–Israel, Russia–because the black experience is really a global experience. We have people of African descent all over. And there are films made about that experience all over.”

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

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~ David Simon