17 Feb IEFTA Partners with European Film Market for Spotlight on Lusophone Africa
IEFTA and European Film Market (EFM) have partnered to host a Spotlight Session that will focus on the growing film business in Portuguese-speaking African countries and lusophone Africa at this year’s virtual Berlinale 2021.
17 February 2021: The session will feature Angolan Actor/Producer Silvio Nascimento, Mozambican filmmaker and programmer Lara Sousa and Cape Verdean filmmaker and producer Samira Vera Cruz. The moderator will be well known artist, creative director and producer Coréon Du. The spotlight will focus on Lusophone Africa’s talented filmmakers and key players value to the international film community and the tech innovations helping them reach global audiences to make their mark on the international stage.
The spotlight session will take place virtually on 3 March 2021 at 15:00 CET and will be followed by a networking event. The session is open to all film professionals accredited for EFM.
For more information, contact Lianne Llewellyn – lianne@iefta.org
Coréon Dú (Moderator)
Coréon Dú considered one of Forbes’ 15 Young African Creatives Rebranding Africa as a result of nearly two decades of contributions to the Angolan and African creative industry. The dignified portrayal of PALOP (African Countries of Portuguese Official Language) and African culture has always been in the forefront. Coréon redefined the aesthetic language of contemporary African audiovisual storytelling with hit Emmy-nominated Telenovela Windeck (2012), which became the first Angolan Telenovela series production syndicated all over the African continent, and the first African series to be broadcast on primetime television in both Brazil and Portugal. Follow up projects such as Jikulumessu (2015), Nzinga, Queen of Angola (2013), and documentaries I Love Kuduro (2014) and Bangaologia – The science of style (2016), have all been well received. Beyond an artistic vision, Coréon has continuously worked to mentor and empower young African creative professionals having launched the careers of many of the regions most celebrated talents such as top models Blesnya Minher, Maria Borges, Amilna Estevão, Alécia Morais and Retha Lethoko, as well as the international careers of actors Freddy Costa , Micaela Reis, and Lesliana Pereira.
Lara Sousa (Panelist)
Lara Sousa is a director and producer. She is the founder of Kulunga Filmes, a company based in Maputo, focused on fostering the cinematographic production ecosystem in Portuguese-speaking African countries. She is currently producing her first documentary The Ship and the Sea which was selected for the Berlinale Doc Station and won the IDFA Bertha Fund Award at the Durban FilmMart 2020. Lara is a fellow of Digital Lab Africa, and Realness Creative Producers Indaba. She also works as training coordinator for the MiradasDoc Market a documentary market with a focus on Latin American and African productions.
Samira Vera-Cruz (Panelist)
Born in São Vicente, Samira Vera-Cruz is a young Cape-Verdean film director and producer. With a major in Film Studies and a minor in Global Communications from the American University of Paris (France), Samira has experience working in Cabo Verde, Angola and Mozambique. She started the production company Parallax Produções in November 2016, and began making films. She debuted her career as a director with the short film Buska Santu, which toured in various festivals and won the Best Fiction Prize at Oiá Festival, 2017 (Mindelo, Cabo Verde). Winner of the Short Films PALOP-TL UE Contest 25 years, representing Cabo Verde, Samira directed her first documentary Hora di Bai, which premiered in Maputo, Mozambique and toured internationally. The young director was selected for Talents Durban 2019, during the Durban International Film Festival, in which she participated with her documentary project And Who Will Cook? and received the PR Consulting Award at the end of the residency. She was also selected with the same project for FIDADOC’s writing residency in 2019 (Morocco), Durban Filmmart (South Africa) and Ouaga Film Lab (Burkina Faso) in 2020. At the latter she won the IDFA and World Cinema Fund/Goethe Institute Awards. In March 2020, Samira became the coordinator for the PALOP-TL Film and Audiovisual Network, with the aim of promoting production and distribution in the region.
Silvio Nascimento (Panelist)
Silvio Nascimento is an Angolan actor and producer who began his career in theatre at the age of 7 in his hometown, Lubango. Silvio has appeared in a variety of films, series and soap operas and has been nominated 3 times for Emmy Awards in New York. More recently, Silvio launched ‘Tellas’, a streaming platform dedicated to creating and disseminating original Portuguese language content internationally.