March 14, 2010
The African Asian and Latin American Film Festival with Luoghi Comuni: the Directors’ Voices
'Luoghi Comuni - little migrating stories' enters a new phase as part of the African Asian and Latin American Film Festival, which will take place in Milan from 15th to 21st March, presenting a set of short video interviews with the film directors.

The initiative is curated by the African Asian and Latin American Film Festival and Kenzi Production in collaboration with lettera27.

Thoughts, stereotypes, experiences and emotions are all to be found in the directors’ experiences captured on video. The videoboxes will be shot, edited and distributed during the six days of the festival, by the staff of Kenzi Production, a company founded in 1997 to promote intercultural dialogue through independent film and TV productions.

A space dedicated to Luoghi Comuni will be open to the public in the city at the Festival Center in the Casello ovest of Porta Venezia (Casa del Pane), a meeting point and venue hosting special events. The interviews with the directors will be projected here, and the posters from previous stages of the project, which took place in Milan and Naples, will also be on display.

The documentary C.A.R.A Italia (Dear Italy), by Dagmawi Yimer in collaboration with Asinitas - lettera27’s partner for the project Confini (Borders) - will be presented at the festival as a non-competing film. C.A.R.A Italia tells the story of Hassan and Abubakar, two young Somali men who, having grown up together, find themselves sharing first their first difficult escape route to Europe, and then the wait for their refugee status to be recognised in a migrant detention centre. Through Hassan’s voice, the work recounts in the first person the story of this journey and the kind of reception our country provides to those who have grown up with the myth of a democratic and civilised Europe.

The lettera27 WikiAfrica Cinema project is dedicated to African cinema. Launched in 2009, in collaboration with Wikimedia Italia, WikiAfrica Cinema focuses on cinema to give African films, festivals, actors and directors an international profile and to promote the creation of distribution systems based on copyleft. Everybody is invited to contribute, by publishing on Wikipedia articles, film reviews, biographies, quotes, images and videos.

Milan’s African Asian and Latin American Film Festival, and COE’s film archive take part in WikiAfrica Cinema and support it with new articles under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, which allows documentation to be published on Wikipedia.

Image: the director Dagmawi Yimer - Courtesy by African, Asian and Latin American Film Festival