DENVER — A film projected onto the screen brings viewers to another place: the coast of Senegal, where the Lebou tribe is fishing from a boat rocking in the ocean.
“We don't see a lot of movies from Africa,” said Ousmane Ndoye. But he’s trying to change that.
Ndoye grew up in Senegal. He immigrated to Colorado more than 20 years ago, and since then, he’s been working towards a dream.
“We want to connect communities, cultures and history beyond borders through the art of filmmaking,” he said.
Now, that’s becoming a reality at the first ever Colorado Diasporic Film Festival.
Ndoye is showing almost 40 short and feature films from five continents. The idea is to use these cinematic works to “illuminate the movement of peoples and the richness of communities across the globe,” according to the festival’s mission.
The festival premiered on Thursday and will run through the weekend at the RiNo Art Park and the Sie Film Center.
“People will see different culture, different communities and different realities,” Ndoye said, including films from across Africa, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States.
“We have film from Colorado, which makes me so happy,” Ndoye said. The filmmaker said he had a cowboy film. Ndoye told him, “Bring it in. We need that cowboy.”
The festival is also featuring films created by African filmmakers encouraged by Ndoye through his nonprofit, the Askkanwii Film Hub.
“Askkanwii is my native dialect. It means community,” Ndoye said. “And the whole purpose is to take filmmakers from Colorado, our beloved home, to take some of our colleagues with us, and we go and create stories.”
Through his film hub, they’ve told stories from more than 15 African countries and other parts of the world.
“It cost us a lot of time. It cost us a lot of hustle, challenges, rejections. It was very hard, but we just stand up, keep going,” he said.
Ndoye said he’s thankful for the support of friends and family who volunteer their time to help create the films, and now the festival.
As they prepared for a day of film showings on Friday, Ndoye’s wife, Priscilla Montoya, whose family is originally from Mexico, helped test the sound and film projector – all while carrying their baby around in a wrap pressed against her body.
Eagerly awaiting the film screenings was Ahmed Babeder. He met Ndoye more than 20 years ago when he came to Colorado from Eritrea.
“We were driving taxis together,” Babeder said. But both aspired to make movies.
Now, Babeder is gleaning inspiration from the festival. He’s written four movie scripts and hopes to show one of his own films at the festival next year.
“I want to tell my story, my part of the story,” he said. The film he’s working on now shows the experience of an Eritrean man who escapes for the land of opportunity, the United States, Babeder said.
“I want the world, not only Colorado, the world, to pay attention and try to recognize those people how they are living,” he said.
Ndoye hopes that by supporting the making and showing of films like these, Colorado can become a global epicenter for diverse storytelling.
“It's different origins, even different skin colors. But we are brothers and sisters,” he said. “It's not about film… what defines us is those moments of sharing.”
He hopes as the festival grows in the future, more international filmmakers will come to love Colorado as much as he does. “What we have here, the landscape, the mountains, the food, everything. That's really why we are growing this Colorado Diasporic Film Festival,” he said.
“There's no better way to change society, to change narratives, to change way of thinking,” than by showing “each and everyone’s stories matter” through film, he said.
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