Africa in the Picture (AITP) is a festival and platform for audio-visual art, film, performing arts and literature from the African continent and its diaspora worldwide. AITP was founded as a film festival in 1987 in The Netherlands, with the aim to showcase cinema from Africa and its diaspora. Since its very first days, AITP became a reference for other festivals on African cinema, as well as for African and diaspora festivals to offer a perspective to their filmmakers for showing their films on an internationally recognized stage.

On Febraury 12, 2019 former director Heidi Lobato officially handed over the baton to artist, director and metteur en scene Oumar Mbengue Atakosso. With the arrival of our new director, the festival can count on a completely new course. AITP will continue focussing on films from makers of the African continent and the African diaspora, but will additionally offer a program of various artistic disciplines of which film and audiovisual productions, multi-media projects and performing arts are central.

With the new course, Oumar Mbengue Atakosso aims to facilitate and anchor the integration of African film, video and multi-media productions, visual art installations and performing art presentations, to create room for discourse on post-colonialism to inform us, to offer socio-antropological perspectives to interest us, and give insights in political culture, economical culture and cultural culture to respond to urgent issues of the avant-garde.

With culture, community, education, and entertainment at its foundation, AITP is an all- encompassing festival that serves as an axis in Amsterdam for film and performing art in the contemporary space of Europe and beyond.

Due to Covid-19 regulations and undesired circumstances in the cultural scene of the Netherlands, and global travel restrictions, we have decided to postpone our festival until September 2022. New dates will be announced when available.

Awards & Prizes

- Audience Award for best short or feature length fiction or documentary film
- Jury Award for best short or feature length fiction or documentary film
- Talent Award for best upcoming directors.

We thank all submitters for the wonderful projects you sent in and appreciate your patience with our delay in announcing the selection for this years program. As the festival dates are postponed, we hope you all understand we will re-announce submitting procedures soon...

Stay healthy!

Rules & Terms

Due to cancellation of our festival both 2020 and 2021, we will be communicating about a new theme that goes along witht the international developments due to Covid-19. The objective of the theme ‘Reconciliation - the Ecosystem’, is provoking reflection on the conflicts with the climate, democracy, economy, capitalism, racism, migration and ourselves. We want to return that reflection toward ourselfves and analyse ourselfs through the theme "Recolonization of the Self".

All entries we have recieved until so far will be judged equally. New entries must reflect such preoccupations, and we ought to consider that inclusivity should not cover fake consciousness. Our programmers will analyse all submissions in relation to this theme.

We accept films from directors from the African continent and the African diaspora worldwide.