African sports films on tour for Commonwealth Games
Africa in Motion (AiM) Film Festival has announced their upcoming festival, ‘Sports Stories from around the African Commonwealth’ which is set to take place during the lead up to the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games.
Africa in Motion (AiM) is an annual African film festival taking place in Scotland. Since its inauguration in 2006, the festival has screened over 350 African films to audiences of around 20,000 people. This year in partnership with Glasgow 2014 and Creative Scotland, AiM is holding a touring programme of African sports films which will travel right across Scotland from 3 June – 25 July 2014.
Festival Project Manager, Justine Atkinson said:‘’Sports Stories from around the African Commonwealth will explore African sports and culture through film, we believe our programme will increase the diversity of content brought to the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games, and will help to contribute to a progressive inter-cultural dialogue through African films on sports. The tour will involve a wide variety of people from across Scotland, the UK and the wider African diaspora and will strive to open up new audiences to the Games’’.
The programme will include over 20 films from across the African Commonwealth, allowing Scotland Commonwealth spectators to watch boxing in Ghana, cycling in Rwanda, long-distance running in Kenya, surfing in South Africa, football in Nigeria and much more. The festival will use sport to highlight some of the main aims of the Commonwealth including HIV/AIDS awareness, democracy, refugee and asylum seekers and the history of slavery. Viewers will be taken on a visual journey through the African Commonwealth highlighting triumphs and key challenges through sports.
Screenings are set to take place in cinema venues across Scotland, and also outside of traditional screening venues through a pop-up cinema initiative, the AiM Shebeen Screen. In South Africa the word shebeen was used to describe an informal drinking place in a township during apartheid, and interestingly, in Scotland it also refers to an unlicensed bar or pub. These cultural links will inspire the design of the AiM Shebeen Screen, which will replicate the way Africans watch films with a mobile projector, screen, African murals, posters and fabric. This pop-up cinema will travel across Scotland allowing audiences to fully immerse themselves in African culture.
There will be a bike-powered screening at the Transport Museum in Glasgow, a Food and Film Marathon, a Film and Freedom Triathlon, children’s workshops and storytelling, discussions about African sport with experts and athletes, and more.
The full programme will be launched on the 27th of April (the anniversary of 20 years of democracy in South Africa).
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