Spanish African Film Festival Clocks 20, Reclaims Spanish Moroccan Cultural Bond

The Tarifa-Tangiers African Film Festival (FCAT) clocked 20 years this year. This year it’s especially reclaiming historic Spanish-Moroccan cultural bonds as a means of forging diversity and cultural dialogue between the two continents.

Held annually April 28 to May 7, on the border cities of Spain (Tarifa) and Morocco (Tangiers), the festival is dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of African, Latin America films, and cultural contents that unite the two continents; in addition to hosting internationally acclaimed filmmakers and film industry experts in Africa and Spain and dispensing awards for various categories of films from shorts, documentaries to animation among others for the past twenty years.

This year, FCAT activities will hold at the recently restored Alcazar Cinema in Tangiers, Morocco, and the Alameda Theatre in Tarifa, Spain. Alcazar will screen films of the Miradas Espanolas and La Tercera raiz sections, while the Alameda Theatre explores Latin America cinema and Spanish subtitled films.

Both cinemas will host special sessions to mark anniversary, with the world premiere of Hicham Ghalbane and Rick Leeuwestein documentary Children of Al-Andalus. It is a true life adaptation of a book of similar title that chronicles the life of the descendants of the Moors expelled from Spain in 1612 which looks at how centuries later the descendants of the exiled are preserving their mixed roots and traditions. It highlights how the Andalusian Muslims and the Sephardic Jews built a new existence in North Africa, bringing new influences to Morocco and enriching existing tradition.

Both cinemas will also screen Carmen Tortosa’s short film La Rotunda centered on the difficult life of immigrants in the settlements of Nijar in Almeria.

Other activities at the festival include Cinema Classroom themed Deciphering the Real. The Non-Conformism of African Cinemas. Programmer and professor, Javier H. Estrada will host four virtual sessions in Spanish language between April 29 to May 2, 2023. It will also feature Aula de Cine – to focus on heterodox approaches to complex realities, tackling subjects as the consequences of failed revolutions, collective creation, or the African roots of films made on European soil. Cinema Classroom will further deal with classic films by Ousmane Sembene, Med Hondo or Sarah Malborough, as well as other lesser known talents building essential filmography such as Randa Maroufi and he Geracao 80 Collective.

The festival closes with a second gala at the Alameda Theatre in Tarifa, Spain.