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BUY YOUR GALA TICKETS AND FESTIVAL PASS!

The New Orléans Afrikan Film and Arts Festival Project
Presents


The first annual Toni Cade Bambara Award for Cultural Leadership

A Message to The New Orléans Afrikan Film and Arts Festival Project

Nothing would please me more than joining you in acknowledging the accomplishments of Vera Warren-Williams and Jennifer Turner. For the first Toni Cade Bambara Award for Cultural Leadership, you could not have chosen better.

Seldom are books and book sellers singled out for the vital service they offer our communities. Toni Cade Bambara was not only an author, she was a constant reader and book buyer. Among her several passions, her dedication to young African American artists was supreme as was her dedication to community support. In text, film and teaching her priority parallels these two awardees.

I am certain she would have taken great delight as a participant in Noafest, and I am equally certain she would be pleased with the honor being shown to the founders of the Community Book Center.

It is in her name then, that I ask Ms. Warren-Williams and Ms. Turner to accept my sincere congratulations.

Toni Morrison


Vera Warren-Williams & Jennifer Turner

Toni Cade Bambara Award for Cultural Leadership as the opening event of the 2010 Mississippi River 9th Ward Film Festival, the New Orléans Afrikan Film and Arts Festival Project (NOAFEST) will host a celebration on Friday October 1, 2010, to present the first annual Toni Cade Bambara Award for Cultural Leadership to two cultural workers who have contributed significantly to the cultural and artistic diversity of the City. This initiative has been made possible in part by a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

We have chosen to name this award for the activist and prolific writer, Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995). Bambara was a practicing artist, filmmaker, educator, feminist, and community activist. Her travels to Cuba and Vietnam helped her see the struggles of African Americans in the context of black nationalist struggles around the globe. She is well known for her novel, The Salt Eaters (1980), but her 1999 novel, Those Bones are not My Child, about the murder of forty black children in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981, is powerful. Toni Morrison edited it and considered it a masterpiece. Bambara once said that she never thought of herself as a writer but as a community person who "writes and does a few other things." But she recognized that "writing is a legitimate way, an important way, to participate in the empowerment of the community that names me" (Black Women Writers, 1984).

 

Join us for the Mississippi River 9th Ward Film and Arts Festival, October 6-9, 2011!

On Friday September 16 at the New Orleans African American Museum, we will offer a Festival Sneak Preview, featuring Mississippi Damned (2009) with Director Tina Mabry.  Admission is free, seating is limited.  Reserve a place at: noafest@neworleansafrikanfilmfest.org or 504-942-8542.

October 6, the Festival opens at the Galvez Restaurant & Atrium with a Gala honoring Harold Battiste, Jr, recipient of the second Toni Cade Bambara Award for Cultural Leadership.  Come hear Jesse McBride Presents the Next Generation and a Battiste composition arranged by Dr. Jean Montes for Molto, a funky chamber orchestra! And for a little lagniappe: "Prelude by the River" at 6pm.

October 7-9, we will screen films on youth, women, the violence they endure and often overcome: Draw Yourself! (France, 2010); Shirley Adams: Portrait of a Mother (South Africa, 2009); Africa United (UK, 2010); Murder on a Sunday Morning (France/U.S., 2001); Central Station (Brazil, 1999); Black Venus (France/Tunisia, 2010), with live music by Charmaine Neville, Fredy Omar con su banda, and the Caesar Brothers Funk Box preceding evening screenings.  And we will host two roundtables: “Black Men and the Justice System” and “Race and Power in New Orleans in Global Perspective.”

Gala Tickets are $75 each or $135 for two.  Tickets available online or by check.

Festival screenings are $5 each.  A Festival Pass for all screenings may be purchased for $20, online or by check.

Make checks payable to NOAFEST, 2670 George Nick Connor Dr., NOLA 70119.
Copyright © New Orleans Afrikan Film and Art Festival