The West African Documentary Forum announces its 3rd
annual Real Life Pan-African Documentary Film Festival
in Accra between May 31st. and June 6th 2008. 52 films
from Africa and its diasporic world will be freely
shown in 4 venues across Accra during the festival. As
in past events, the festival will provide a forum for
showcasing innovative and historical documentaries on
African and African diasporic communities and themes.
It will also feature professional workshops on new
technologies of film production and digital archiving,
as well as networks with film and television outlets
worldwide. In addition to the exhibition, workshops
and exchanges of film ideas and techniques by
professionals, the festival will also feature two
unusual and exciting exhibitions from a high school
visual literacy program in which students present
outstanding works, as well as works by students from
film schools in Ghana, Nigeria, Mali, Senegal, Sudan,
and the USA.
There will be 3 prizes to be won. The best African
film will be awarded the $5,000 Afro-Pop Prize
sponsored by US based National Black Programming
Consortium. The best African Diasporic film will be
awarded the $5,000 WALTER MOSLEY Prize. The best
African student film will be awarded $1,000 JOE AMPAH
MEMORIAL Prize.
The West African Documentary Forum and its Real Life
Pan-African Documentary Film Festival are jointly
registered as a Not-for-Profit organization whose
mission is to develop and sustain practices of
documenting African and African diasporic stories
through film and photography, by exhibiting and
exchanging them, as well as archiving them for
educational and cultural purposes. 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. Danny Glover chairs the board of the Forum
with members drawn from award winning African and
African diasporic filmmakers, scholars and policy
makers. 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. We use the festival to shape the training
of younger generations of filmmakers, particularly in
Africa, by inviting student films as well as their
attendance to a festival where amateurs interact with
professionals. The two festivals in previous 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 Accra.
This year continues our exceptional tradition and we
implore film enthusiasts, filmmakers and scholars to
visit the peaceful and picturesque city of Accra in
Ghana between May 31st and June 6th to experience a
week long of exciting and innovative film exhibitions
and an energetic congregation of film enthusiasts.

Awam Amkpa and Lydie Diakhate
(Co-Producers and Directors)