Casa África en el XIII Festival de Cine de Lanzarote

African cinema will once again be present at this annual event with the 7th Art on the island of Lanzarote and will do so through Casa África in its task of disseminating African cinema, an important communication channel with the neighbouring continent which rarely reaches commercial auditoriums.

In this 13th edition, the organisers of  the Lanzarote Film Festival are sure that this is the year for going for broke as well as for courage, as the Spanish cinematographic industry did not record its best figures in 2012. But at the same time 2013 is being the year for innovation and entrepreneurship. There are simultaneous new releases in auditoriums and Internet; consolidated streaming platforms; crowfounding operating as an alternative funding; audiovisual products that ask for interactive participation from the spectator; series and short films as an infinite field of experimentation; etc.

In this edition we will be able to see 60 selected short films in three Official Sections  in the Competition, making Arrecife's centre a place for conversation after each screening, because cinema does not end when the lights come on, but when the last sip of coffee is drunk. Five Spanish feature films will also be launched, an important example of who we are and where we are going.

Just as in previous editions, there will be an Exhibition of African Short films which come from Casa África. So near and yet so far could be a good subtitle for this section, because Lanzarote shares the same latitude with the African continent, emigrated population, historical influences and soil in suspension, but it hardly knows about things regarding the reality of a continent which is in a constant situation of uncertainty (social, political and economic). Once again, Casa África and Al-Tarab collaborate with the Festival handing over the exhibition rights of the short films undertaken in Africa.

The 13th International Lanzarote Film Festival will be held from the 8th to 19th April 2013. The exhibition of short African films  supplied by Casa África will be screened on the13th April at 6 p.m. at theTeatro Insular of Lanzarote showing the following titles:

• Thato (South Africa, 2011)
  Portrait of a South African woman who is expecting her second child. During the whole of the film, her face shows us her fear of losing this child just as she did with the first, from AIDS. From the desperate hope, liberating sobs, her emotions resemble the landscape where the film takes place, evolving with the seasons; a metaphor for the fate of a continent that is going through a profound change.
• Yvette (Burkina Faso, 2011)
  The reality of a woman in a village of Perkouan, in Burkina Faso, who we discover through her daily work, her environment and her thoughts.
• Brûleurs (Algeria, 2011)
  Amine, a young Algerian, buys a video camera in a shop in Orán with which he starts to record the memories of his town, his house and lastly his girlfriend and mother. He goes onboard a dinghy with Malik, Lofti, Mohammed and Khalil to cross the Mediterranean. With the camera in his hand he films the wake of the journey.
• Who killed me (Tanzania, 2012)
  View of the life of a working class Congolese emigrant in Toronto before, during and after they shoot and kill him in front of the place where he works. Going through his mother and the police who find the body we see that there are very different lives in the same town.