Real Life Documentary Festival 2008

REAL-LIFE DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL:
A PAN-AFRICAN FESTIVAL OF DOCUMENTARY FILMS

3rd Edition: May 31st to June 6th 2008, in Accra and Kumasi

We are one of a few festivals that provide a forum for documentary films and filmmakers who focus on African and African-diasporic themes. Our objective is to stimulate Africans to document their own histories while exchanging film vocabularies, methods and contexts with filmmakers from Africa and other continents. Our mission is to facilitate documentary filmmaking that enables Africans produce new forms of knowledge about themselves while archiving their histories, cultural and political transformations. This unique festival continues to be an effective project not only for cross-cultural and intercontinental exchanges between professional filmmakers, but also among students from Film Schools in Africa.

The festival has embraced three focal points since its inception. First, it provides a forum for showcasing innovative and historical documentaries on African and African diasporic communities and issues. Moreover, it seeks to shape the training of younger generations of filmmakers, particularly in Africa, by inviting student films as well as attendance to a festival where amateurs interact with professionals from all over the world. Furthermore, the festival has initiated a visual literacy campaign among high school students by training them in photography and basic documentary skills. Projects derived from this section of our work were proudly displayed and curated by the high schoolers themselves, and are currently being developed into a book of photographs by young Africans.

The two festivals in years past, brought together filmmakers from over 20 African countries, the United States, France, England, Haiti and Jamaica. We have so far exhibited over 140 films in several venues to exciting and diverse crowds in Accra and Kumasi, Ghana. We honored filmmakers such as William Greaves, Kwaw Ansah, St. Clair Bourne and John Akomfrah. We equally ran highly successful training workshops led by prominent visiting filmmakers in Ghana’s premier film school – the National Film and Television Institute. The festivals also brought in high schools to view, interpret and adopt documentary films as educational materials. We continue to be the festival most documentary filmmakers want to be associated with.

REAL LIFE PRODUCTIONS

Incorporation n° G. 17, 329 – N.G.O. n° D.S.W./2832

Number 12, 4th Norla PMB 84 CT – Labone, Accra – Ghana

We intend to expand our program to include organizations in the film industry as well as diverse Television stations from Africa, in order to underscore the role of documentaries in their educational and cultural programming. This year our program will also travel to Casablanca, Kampala, Khartoum, Kinshasa and Lagos, where we will exhibit films, as well as set up training workshops in association with the National Black Programming Consortium.

The Real Life Documentary Festival has historically received funds from Prince Claus Foundation, Discovery Television, Africalia, New York University and local sponsors in Ghana. This year we are seeking your organization’s support to enable us to continue to make our festival a major platform for documentary filmmaking, as well as for promoting the medium as a tool of education, oral history, and archival development.