África Mostra-se / Film programming / Lisbon

Choosing which African narratives Lisbon gets to meet.

África Mostra-se was never only a calendar of screenings. It was the craft of picking films, opening doors with directors, building a programme people could feel, and coaching voices into public rooms — the same narrative muscle that later showed up in TEDx and HAAM's film work.

Southern Europe edition Film edition

AFMLisboa

Choose the story before the screen lights up.

FilmPublic voice

festival founded

2010

África Mostra-se began as a collective Lisbon platform for African cinema and culture, later growing into multi-artform editions.

days in AFM '13

23–26 May and 1–2 June 2013: screenings, music, debate, workshops, and public programme across partner venues.

films in selection

A curated slate balanced partner institutions and independent producers across Angola, South Africa, Congo/France, and beyond.

public stage

Lisbon

Institut Français, Goethe-Institut, ISCTE, ATLA, and later Cinemateca partnerships put African narratives into Portuguese civic space.

The premise

A festival is a curation job disguised as a celebration.

Born in 2010, África Mostra-se set out to show Portuguese audiences and African diasporas a continent that is diverse, confident, and artistically specific — cinema at the centre, with performance, visual art, debate, and workshops around it.

My work sat in the choices: which narratives belong together, which directors to pursue, how to brief partners, and how to help people speak once the lights came up. That is the same discipline as coaching a TEDx talk or shaping a social-impact film campaign — find the human story, protect its clarity, then give it a stage.

The working model

Theme. Titles. People in the room.

01Name the narrative
Lock a theme strong enough to guide selection and soft enough for artists to surprise it.
02Build the slate
Negotiate rights, embassies, subtitles, and travel so the chosen films can actually arrive.
03Coach the encounter
Prepare directors, moderators, and speakers so the audience leaves with more than a screening memory.

Narrative selection

Decide which stories a city gets to see of a continent.

Programming was not a catalogue dump. The work was choosing a theme, protecting aesthetic diversity, and refusing the flattened image of Africa that still travels easily through European media. AFM '13 centred The Influence of African Cultures in the Arts — dialogues and inspiration — so every screening and side event answered the same question.

Theme first, then titles that could carry it in a room
Balance archive, contemporary festival cinema, and Lusophone presence
Keep Portuguese audiences and African diasporas in the same conversation

Director liaison

Treat filmmakers as collaborators, not content suppliers.

Once a title mattered, the next job was relationship: invitations, embassies, rights, subtitles, and whether a director or producer could travel. The 2014 planning already reached for Alain Gomis after Tey's FESPACO win, Jahmil Qubeka's Of Good Report, Adeyemi Michael's Sodiq with a documentary workshop for Lisbon's peripheries, and Baobab shorts via Film Africa / Africa in Motion networks.

Personal outreach to directors and producers
Partner institutions as bridges, not substitutes for judgement
Workshops and presence when a film needed a living advocate in the room

Public coaching

Help people carry a story onto a stage.

Film was the spine; debate, music, visual art, and spoken word made the festival a rehearsal for public voice. Roundtables with ISCTE and RDP África, artist coaching, and community workshops sat next to the screenings. That same craft — listening for the human thread, tightening the narrative, preparing someone to speak in public — later shaped TEDx São Tomé and other HAAM stages.

Mesa redonda as a place to practice argument, not only consume film
Artists and speakers coached toward clarity under time pressure
A through-line from festival curation to TEDx speaker development

What remains

The website is gone. The curation practice is not.

africamostrase.info no longer carries the live festival. What survives is the working method: selecting narratives under constraint, liaising with filmmakers, and preparing people to speak in public. That method now shows up across HAAM film projects and TEDx stages.

Through-line

From Lisbon screens to TEDx coaching.

Festival curation trained the same ear used later to help speakers find the one story worth standing under a red circle for.

Project record

Built with a Lisbon collective, for a city listening for Africa.

This case study focuses on narrative and programming craft. The fuller festival record — partners, budgets, authorisations, and day-by-day logistics — remains in the project archive.

Festival: África Mostra-se — Mostra de Cinema e Cultura Africana
Location: Lisbon, Portugal
Editions in archive: 2013–2014 (festival founded 2010)
AFM '13 theme: The Influence of African Cultures in the Arts
HAAM role: Narrative selection, film programming, director liaison, public coaching, and transmedia
Related HAAM work: Cindy Baptista (AFM art activity); TEDx São Tomé (speaker coaching lineage)

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