The Film Lounge

Our film lounge is a meeting place and information platform. It combines two networking activities:

• The film lounge will be a space where accomplished African and international filmmakers will share their experiences with emerging talents. Every year the CNIFF will invite up to three prominent figures to the film lounge.  These can be winners of prestigious international film festivals or African filmmakers with distinct style that offer learning opportunity for young filmmakers. In the film lounge, the featured filmmakers will share their experience and answer to questions of young professionals in an informal and relaxed environment (unlike formal Q and A sessions). Audiovisual facilities will be provided in the room to help filmmakers access their films for demonstration. The film lounge will host not only film directors but also script writers, cinematographers, editors, actors, costume designers, etc.

• The film lounge will also be a meeting place of African filmmakers, producers, financers and distributors. In doing so, the lounge will contribute to the development of African film markets. The lounge will further offer information on major film funding sources, requirements and application guidelines.

Check who is in the Lounge:

Claude Haffner

November 10th: 9:30AM-12:00PM - @ ITALIAN CULTURAL INSTITUTE

The Lounge will feature a Female Filmmakers Roundtable with Claude Haffner. The acclaimed documentary filmmaker Claude Haffner will share her experience with Ethiopian female filmmakers. Claude will talk about: - The challenge of filming in Africa as a woman - Being a women in the film industry - The stories and point of views of men and women - We know how difficult it is for a woman to work in a male industry, is there a good side to being a woman in filmmaking? Claude Haffner will share her experience of making "Footprints of my other" in Congo: a documentary which took her 6 years to finalize. She will screen some sequences to emphasize her arguments. She will also discuss the projects of the women in the panel to see how to polish them.

Claude Haffner is a French-Congolese director and production manager of documentary films. She studied documentary filmmaking at the Altermedia School in Paris (2002). She directed her first film “essay” titled Ko Bongisa Mutu (Arrange your head) in a Congolese hair salon in Paris. In 2004, she filmed “promenade” with the French film maker / ethnographer Jean Rouch, a few days before his death. This was followered by a vignette called La canne musicale (The musical cane). After two years of research on African Cinema, her last documentary D`une fleur double et de 4000 autres (Of a double-headed flower and 4000 others) focused on African Cinema history, as analyzed by her father, Pierre Haffner, one of the first critics of this cinema (2005). The same year, Claude Haffner has also completed her Masters Degree on The documentary, a possible remedy to the disease in African Cinema at Sorbonne University. Claude Haffner moved to South Africa in 2005. She worked as a Production Manager and Researcher on the docu-drama The Manuscripts of Timbuktu by Zola Maseko, shot in Mali, Morocco and South Africa – 90 min., produced by Blackroots Pictures, June 2007 to July 2008. Then Claude Haffner worked as Production Manager and Researcher for the feature-docu-drama By any means necessary by Ramadan Suleman, shot in Algeria, Mozambique, Cape-Verde, Tanzania and South Africa - 90 min., produced by Natives at Large (in post production). At the mean time she was giving classes on African Cinema at the two film's school based in Johannesburg: AFDA and Big Fish. Claude Haffner went back to France in 2011 to achieve her documentary Footprints of my other. She's now based in Paris and works on the development of a documentary on Miriam Makeba directed by Ramadan Suleman.