2021 Festival
The 2021 Cascade Festival of African Films will be held virtually from February 5 to March 10, 2021. The festival will remain free and open to the public, but films will be shown online. Check back here soon for more details and the list of films!
Visiting Artists
( OneRPM Studios)
Blitz Bazawule is a filmmaker and musician born in Ghana and based in New York. Blitz’s feature directorial debut ‘The Burial Of Kojo’ premiered at Urbanworld Film Festival where it won Best Narrative Feature (World Cinema). It also won the Grand Prize at the 2019 Luxor African Film Festival in Egypt. The film was hailed as “a spellbinding experience” and “a striking feature filmmaking debut” by The Los Angeles Times and The Hollywood Reporter respectively. As a composer and musician, Blitz has released 4 studio albums: Stereotype (2009), Native Sun (2011), Afropolitan Dreams (2014) and Diasporadical (2016). Blitz is the founder of Africa Film Society, an organization focused on the preservation and distribution of classic African cinema. He is a Senior TED Fellow and recipient of the Vilcek Prize
Sephora Woldu is an Eritrean American writer/filmmaker based in San Francisco. Named by Filmmaker Magazine as one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film, her work has won acclaim with audiences including the American Film Institute and Eritrean community centers from Philadelphia to San Jose. Sephora received the Craig Brewer Emerging Filmmaker Award (Indie Memphis), Balalaica Filmmaker Award (Moscow Indie Film Festival), and the Special Jury Prize for Bold Innovation (RiverRun International Film Festival) for her Tigrinya/ English debut feature length narrative film, Life is Fare. Sephora also co-founded the Asmara Indie Film Festival, studied graduate architecture, and currently works with the global design firm IDEO because among other things, she is full of surprises.
Ifrah Mansour is a Somali, refugee, muslim, multimedia artist and a teacher based in Minnesota. Her artwork explores trauma through the eyes of children to uncover the resiliencies of minorities. She interweaves poetry, puppetry, films, and installations that elicit a multi-generational conversations. She’s been featured in BBC, Vice, Okayafrica, Thrillist, MiddleEast Eye, Star Tribune, and City Pages. Her critically-acclaimed, “How to Have Fun in a Civil War” premiered at the Guthrie Theatre and toured to metro-cities in Minnesota. Her first national museum exhibition; “Can I touch it” premiered at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Her visual poem, “I am a refugee” is part of PBS’s short Film festival. “My Aqal; banned and blessed” was exhibited at Queens Museum in New York. Learn more at facebook.com/ifrahmansourart