ABOUT AITP

Cognizance and Action

AITP is a festival and platform for audio- visual art, film, performing arts and literature from the African continent and its diaspora worldwide. With culture, community, education, and entertainment at its foundation, AITP is all- encompassing and serves as an axis in Amsterdam for film and performing art in the contemporary space of Europe and beyond.

AITP aims to respond to the growing demand for educational tools and cultural programming that represent not only the local diversity but also the complex intercultural and transnational realities in which citizens have to live and function today. With an increasing African and African diaspora population in Europe it is essential to provide in the representation of diversity and offer multilayered narratives. AITP plays an important role in the imaging of groups in society, as well as on the identity formation and sense of belonging of citizens. We believe that images that present a more equal worldview can help to overcome stereotyping and generalization, and can result in an inclusive and balanced cultural ecosystem.

AITP contributes to a broad view on the world and fellow citizens, and allows a deeper awareness of the importance of inclusivity, intercultural dialogue and understanding.

Organization

On February 12, 2019 former Africa in the Picture director Heidi Lobato, who guided the festival for over 15 years, officially handed over the baton to ARTIST, DIRECTOR and METTEUR EN SCENE         Oumar Mbengue Atakosso. Heidi Lobato continues to be involved with AITP as the President of the Advisory Board.

With the arrival of a new director, the festival is going through a transition from film festival towards multi disciplinary arts platform. The festival will continue to focus on films from makers of the African continent and its African diaspora, but will additionally offer a program of various artistic disciplines such as performing arts and literature.

With AITP as a multi disciplinary art platform, Oumar Mbengue Atakosso aims to facilitate and anchor the integration of film, visual art installations, performing arts and literary séances, to create room for discourse on post-colonialism to inform us, to offer socio-anthropological perspectives to interest us, and give insights in political culture, economical culture and cultural culture to respond to urgent issues of the avant-garde.

Oumar Mbengue Atakosso works with a dynamic team of professionals, volunteers, scholars and interns, and counts on the advice and input of the advisory board.

History

AITP was founded as a film festival in 1987 in The Netherlands, with the aim to showcase cinema from Africa and its diaspora. Since its very first days, AITP became a reference for other festivals on African cinema, as well as for African festivals to offer a perspective to their filmmakers for showing their films on an internationally recognized stage.

Throughout the years, AITP obtained particular expertise in research about the African and the African diaspora contemporary film and arts in general, its artistic development and the underlying history and reality that is not part of the existing dominant structures, narratives and actual discourse.

AITP became a platform for restoring the connection between art and society, which until recently has almost always led to a reflection of a shared European history and present, but from perspectives other than the western canon.

Today AITP explores the fringes of African contemporary cinema; where visual arts meet performing art, and where the correlation between writing, documenting and reinventing is essential in the process of creating new narratives.

AITP main pillars are:

• Educational: Document Yourself
• Reflective: Café Littéraire
• Informational: AITP Festival
• Sustainable: BIPFAS

Africa in the Picture Foundation

Africa in the Picture is a cultural foundation based in the Netherlands and registered at the chamber of commerce under KvK number: 73985252