The Pan African Film & Arts Festival hosts its 30th annual festival through May 1 with a hybrid of in-theater screenings and a live ArtFest. The screenings take place at the Cinemark at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza in Leimert Park. Metro is a proud sponsor of the event.
Above is a short film on artist Shinique Smith, whose artwork will be integrated at the future Martin Luther King Jr. Station, which will serve Leimert Park with a new underground station when it opens. The film will be shown before several feature films at the festival, including Ferguson Rises by award-winning filmmaker Mobolaji Olambiwonnu, who produced Metro’s Crenshaw/LAX Community Voices series of short films highlighting artists and community leaders. To learn more about Metro Art and artworks on the Crenshaw/LAX Line, click here.
Use the Transit app — Metro’s official app — to plan transit trips to the film festival.
Since 1992,The Pan African Film and Arts Festival (PAFF) has become the international beacon for the Diaspora arts community. As the largest Black History Month events in the U.S., every year filmmakers, fine artists and unique craftspeople from over 40 countries and 6 continents converge upon Los Angeles to showcase their pivotal work.
I love the Pan-African Film Festival… and this year the website is so much better — namely, it has a calendar, which makes it SO much easier to figure out what films are playing on any given date. Before, every film was just listed by title and then, at the end of a short blurb, there were the dates on which it was playing.
If you’re curious about African cinema but don’t know where to start, I wrote a thing: https://ericbrightwell.com/2021/03/06/african-cinema/