25 years on from the first Festival of African, Asian and Latin American Cinema, we are moved. We want to tell you about some moments of this adventure: the ones that made us laugh most and that moved us the most, the ones we learned from, the ones that allowed us to discover worlds and directors whose names are on everyone’s lips but were then unknown. We decided to call these good memories “I WAS THERE” and our voices are those of Annamaria Gallone and Alessandra Speciale, the two artistic directors. We invite everyone who was there, who have passed by and who crossed our paths, to join us in a collective story, perhaps the first ever by a Film Festival, by sending a message to festival@coeweb.org, including “i was there” in the subject.

The African Film Festival allowed us from the very beginning to have more of an impact and to exist after the showings: we went into the cinemas and into the schools. Nobody knew then that an African cinema even existed. With the help of the film critic Clément Tapsoba we started a magazine on the world of African cinema, with a strong orientation towards the themes of pan-Africanism and the Diaspora. “Ecrans d’Afrique/African screen” was to be published for 7 years, with contributors all over Africa, an editorial office in Burkina under Tapsoba and the filmmaker Gaston Kaboré and one in Milan.

The African Film Festival allowed us from the very beginning to have more of an impact and to exist after the showings: we went into the cinemas and into the schools. Nobody knew then that an African cinema even existed. With the help of the film critic Clément Tapsoba we started a magazine on the world of African cinema, with a strong orientation towards the themes of pan-Africanism and the Diaspora. “Ecrans d’Afrique/African screen” was to be published for 7 years, with contributors all over Africa, an editorial office in Burkina under Tapsoba and the filmmaker Gaston Kaboré and one in Milan.

Annamaria Gallone

we began to produce the first films by African directors whose creative power we were the first to glimpse, such as “La République des enfants” by the Senegalese Moussa Sene Absa. I remember something tragi-comic; the first edition of the Festival was in February. A HUGE MISTAKE! In Milan there was the snow and the Africans turned up in sandals! An immediate solution had to be found and it was OK, but from the next year we moved the date to the springtime!

In 1991 our Festival was held in the middle of the Gulf War and we did not know how to deal with the atmosphere of war that was all-pervasive and that inevitably involved the many directors invited from countries whose positions were very different from one another.

Alessandra Speciale

Mohamed Challouf (1992)

Marcello Bivona (1992)