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"I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.”
- The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes
Contemporary African and Afrodiasporic filmmakers explore ancestral roots, cultural and familial memory, and delve into the haunting mystics and social politics of connection, yearning, immigration, Western hegemony, and hopes of return throughout the Global South. Afro-descendants live everywhere on the globe, speaking multiple languages, while negotiating relationships that simultaneously reveal differences and unexpected similarities of Black people worldwide. While making new lives, friendships, and communities, the characters in these films also negotiate what it is to remember who they are or where they come from, by reconciling struggle and loss into resonant connections.
Isata, a West African immigrant, comes across a newspaper profile on best-selling author of Redemption Of A Boy Soldier, Mamadou Kargbo. A picture of him as a boy soldier unearths long forgotten childhood memories. Convinced that Mamadou was once the child soldier who wiped out her family during their country's civil war, she resolves to track him down. The closer she gets, more she grapples with thoughts of retribution or forgiveness.
"I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.”
- The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes
Contemporary African and Afrodiasporic filmmakers explore ancestral roots, cultural and familial memory, and delve into the haunting mystics and social politics of connection, yearning, immigration, Western hegemony, and hopes of return throughout the Global South. Afro-descendants live everywhere on the globe, speaking multiple languages, while negotiating relationships that simultaneously reveal differences and unexpected similarities of Black people worldwide. While making new lives, friendships, and communities, the characters in these films also negotiate what it is to remember who they are or where they come from, by reconciling struggle and loss into resonant connections.
Isata, a West African immigrant, comes across a newspaper profile on best-selling author of Redemption Of A Boy Soldier, Mamadou Kargbo. A picture of him as a boy soldier unearths long forgotten childhood memories. Convinced that Mamadou was once the child soldier who wiped out her family during their country's civil war, she resolves to track him down. The closer she gets, more she grapples with thoughts of retribution or forgiveness.