Afrotopia, the debut fiction feature from Gabonese writer-director David Mboussou, follows Ezéchiel, a young artist trying to exist on his own terms — creatively, spiritually, personally — while being crushed under financial, family, community, and historical pressures.
Set in Gabon, where the natural world holds sacred meaning that colonization spent generations teaching people to distrust, Afrotopia argues that reclaiming ancestral knowledge is a necessity.
Making its New York premiere at the upcoming 33rd New York African Film Festival (NYAFF, Film at Lincoln Center, May 6–12), the film is based directly on Mboussou's own biography. Born and raised in Libreville, the son of two mixed-race parents — each born of French colonist fathers and Gabonese mothers — the colonial fracture the film examines is part of his own history.
That estrangement from ancestral culture, and the question of what it means to reclaim it, drive both Ezéchiel on screen and Mboussou behind the camera.
Before making Afrotopia, Mboussou taught himself filmmaking while studying marketing in Paris, co-directed the web documentary "I Am Congo" (picked up by National Geographic and awarded best humanitarian documentary at South Africa's Rapid Lion Film Festival), and directed the "Kwele" music video for French-Cameroonian composer James BKS and his father, the legendary African musician Manu Dibango.
In the video, Mboussou speaks directly about the film, his identity, and why he made it.
The 33rd New York African Film Festival, taking place at Film at Lincoln Center, May 6–12, is organized by African Film Festival, Inc., and runs under the theme "As the Stars Sow the Earth."
