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AMERICAN BLACK FILM FEST DOES L.A. AGAIN: Founder Jeff Friday kicks off screening weekend.
Introduced by Academy Award winner, Halle Berry, the film captures this year’s festival theme; romance and sexuality in black cinema.
Spawned from the need to see and showcase films of, by, and about African Americans, the event is capturing great artists, great audiences and the eye of Hollywood.
“The ABFF is an international film festival that started about 12 years ago at the Acapulco Black Film Festival,” said fest founder Jeff Friday. “It’s a five-day event geared to give black filmmakers from around the world the opportunity to showcase their movies, as well as give black actors and black artists a chance to showcase their work. [This] is bringing the aspiring artists community together with the accomplished community and with media and corporations, and throwing them all in one captive environment and watch all the magical things happen.”
Based on the history of American cinema and black films, for that matter, it’s no wonder it took Friday to create this kind of internal “magic” in order to bring black film to a much deserved platform.
“It’s important because there are not many vehicles to showcase black art and that extends beyond film and entertainment,” Friday said of the spark that led to the creation of ABFF. “I used to go to the mainstream festivals around the world just as a film fan and I would rarely see films that were either made by black people of starred black people or were really about the black experience. You just wondered, 'Do African Americans make movies?' Then in 1997 I was with two good friends, and we decided to model a festival after Sundance – a black film festival. What we discovered is that there are many black films. In fact, we had 19 film submissions our very first year and this year we got 400. There are black movies out there, it’s just somebody’s got to take it on to give them a place to be seen and that’s what we decided to do.”
Originally, the festival was held in Acapulco, Mexico and held the name the Acapulco Black Film Festival. After a five year stay in south of the border, the festival came Stateside in 2002 and became the American Black Film Festival – it’s new host town, Miami. After another five-year stint, Friday and co switched coasts and headed to Hollywood, and for the second year, the event is taking place in Los Angeles.
“We came to LA because we wanted to connect a bit more with industry insiders, which were the studios and high level executives,” Friday explained. “We were getting a lot of participation from the actors and directors, but we were getting weren’t really getting a lot of love from the studios. We came here two years ago to really get on the map with regard to some of the big studios. This festival really isn’t about where we are it’s about we do while we’re here. So we really do try to make our destination secondary to what we’re all about.”
Friday said that every year, the film festival has a theme that they focus on in some of the submissions and as an issue to tackle both in the symposiums and outside the festival. Themes have varied from the black family to music in film. This year’s them is romance and sexuality in cinema.
“We’re using the festival to create dialog and show films that deal with that kind of poignant issues related to romance and sexuality,” he described. “The real issue is that there has been a shortage over the last 50 years in American film of films that star black people that deal with any aspect of romance and sexuality, so we really want to explore that. We’re going to be doing a number of special screenings.
Those special screenings included “Mandingo,” Spike Lee’s “She’s Gotta Have It,” and “Mahogany,” starring Diana Ross. The festival opens with the legendary film “Carmen Jones,” starring Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge.
“[It] was the first film that cast two black actors in a romantic/sexual context,” Friday said. “And we’re going to close with an HBO documentary, the premiere of a film called ‘The Black List.’ It’s a documentary about the lives, careers, and challenges of many African American people from all walks of life – from entertainment and politics to people who have social and media careers and that sort of thing. These are two very important films to open and close [the festival].”
In addition to the great classic films and independent films being screened at the fest, ABFF also hosts a number of symposiums and panel discussions about industry issues, cinema content, and Black Hollywood. The events started Thursday, with the opening night and cocktail party, and they run almost “20 hours a day,” according to Friday, from Thursday until Sunday, with events centered in Beverly Hills.
“We’ve got a lot of great things happening,” Friday continued. The event that is close to being sold out is what we’re calling a ‘Waiting to Exhale’ reunion. We’re bringing in the ladies who starred in the film. Angela Bassett, Lela Rochon, and Loretta Divine are already confirmed. I don’t want to jinx it, but it looks like we’ll have the four stars. This is just purely entertainment. We’ll bring the ladies up and have them talk about the film and how much fun they had making the film. Every year what we try to do is screen a popular film. The idea is to have a not necessarily critically acclaimed film and essentially have a reunion on stage.”
With all the high profile and industry-ite opportunity Friday boasts at this year’s event, he clarified that all are welcome to enjoy the fest. The ABFF is open to the public and tickets can be purchased online at the festival website, www.abff.com.
“About half of our audience is people from the industry, the other half is people who just like films and want to be in the mix,” Friday said. “We encourage people to come out and not be intimidated by the thought that it might be an industry thing or an insider thing – it certainly is not.
For more on ABFF, the screening schedule, and tickets, go to the website at www.abff.com.
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-------- ABFF 2008 --------
The 12th annual American Black Film Festival
returns to Los Angeles, August 7-10. Film
submission is now open. Registration
discounts are available through May 15.
For information visit www.abff.com
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