AfricaIs aCountry

The First Black Woman to win Sundance Best Director

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

The First Black Woman to win Sundance Best Director

By
Sean Jacobs

Aava DuVernay leads a movement to organize African-American film festivals and secure theatrical releases for black independent films.

A still from Ava DuVernay's "Middle of Nowhere."

I used to run an annual post mocking Sundance’s offering of Africa-themed films or films by directors of African descent. (I didn’t bother last year, but here’s 2010’s version complete with a good dose of indignation.) It’s gotten slightly better, but Sundance still comes with the usual offerings of pirates, mostly films by Westerners (not a bad thing in itself, if they’re made well and with good stories) or about Westerners finding themselves or saving Africans. Anyway, there’s some news to celebrate from this year’s festival: the first woman director of African descent has won the award for Best Director for Dramatic Film at the festival. She is Ava DuVernay, director of the drama “Middle of Nowhere,” a film about a woman whose husband is incarcerated. See above for an interview with DuVernay on Sundance’s Youtube channel:

DuVernay is the right choice.

I saw DuVernay’s debut feature film, “I will follow,” a beautifully filmed, languid contemplation on death and family, at a New School film conference last year.  DuVernay is also a leading figure in a movement to organize African-American film festivals and orchestrate theatrical releases for black independent films, usually  neglected by mainstream advertising and theaters. Maybe things will get better for black women filmmakers in the U.S. now. Congratulations to her. Here‘s a video interview at Sundance 2012 with DuVernay about “Middle of Nowhere.”

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.