AMERICA STREET

By Idrissou Mora-Kpai, an award-winning Beninese filmmaker whose films have screened at international film festivals such as in Berlin, Rotterdam, Vienna, Milano, Busan, Sheffield, Cinema du Réel, and FID Marseille., March 10, 2022

Connecting With a Global Audience

My first collaboration with FLEFF dates back to 2012, when I came from Europe for a residency at Cornell. I had the opportunity to present my two films, ARLIT, THE SECOND PARIS (2005) and INDOCHINA TRACES OF A MOTHER (2011). In 2019, after joining Ithaca College as an Assistant Professor, I reconnected with the festival.

Perhaps my most noteworthy experience with FLEFF concerns my film AMERICA STREET (2020), released in the midst of a pandemic.

AMERICA STREET traces the story of Joe, the owner of a small corner store in Charleston, South Carolina’s east side neighborhood. Taking place during three months of 2015, the film sets Joe’s daily struggles against the backdrop of racist violence in the city, from the killing of Walter Scott by a police officer to the Emanuel Church massacre by a young White supremacist.

The film examines how African Americans feel marginalized in a once predominantly Black city like Charleston, and how White supremacy is becoming more pervasive and insidious in America.

This film was selected to be screened at several festivals. However, the pandemic caused the festivals to be cancelled or postponed. In June 2020, following the killing of George Floyd and the upheavals for racial justice that followed, I felt that the timeliness of the topic meant I could not delay the screening of the film any longer.

Instead, I decided to use the new technological opportunities that the pandemic made available for independent cinema distribution.

Idrissou Mora-Kpai, an award-winning Beninese filmmaker whose films have screened at international film festivals such as in Berlin, Rotterdam, Vienna, Milano, Busan, Sheffield, Cinema du Réel, and FID Marseille.

FLEFF, together with Cinemapolis and the Park Center of Independent Media, played an important role in realizing this virtual release. Together we organized a free one-week streaming event for AMERICA STREET.

During this virtual run, AMERICA STREET had 7,000 viewers from all over the globe (America, Europe, Africa and Asia).

The following September, the film was officially released, again, in collaboration with Cinemapolis, FLEFF and the PCIM.

To accompany the release, we organized a webinar with leading scholars in the field of Cinema and African American Studies: R.A. Judy (Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Pittsburgh), Janet Walker (Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara), Reece Auguiste (Associate Professor of Critical Media Practices, University of Colorado, Boulder), Brett Bossard (Executive Director, Cinemapolis, Ithaca) and moderated by Dr. Patricia Zimmermann (Professor at Ithaca College, co-director of FLEFF).

FLEFF: A DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENT