The well-lit cell

Why “community cinema” does no favors for Afro and Indigenous cinema

Quibdó África Film Festival 2025 - Biblioteca Arnoldo Palacios

Some categories are born with good intentions but end up acting as barriers. “Community cinema” is one of them.

In Colombia, in Latin America, on the festival circuit, the label is generously applied whenever a camera is held by Black or Indigenous hands. The gesture seems inclusive. What it does, in practice, is something else entirely: it draws a line between cinema and the cinema of others. The former competes, is distributed, and generates critical acclaim. The latter receives applause for inclusion and returns home without screens.

The label does not describe an aesthetic. It does not describe a narrative form or a mode of production. It describes an ethnic and territorial origin disguised as a cinematic category.

A film about the Atrato River is no more “community-based” than Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma is “neighborhood cinema.” Both are born from a specific territorial memory, a childhood, a body in a place. Only one went to Venice.

When the term is defended, the argument is this: without that category, that kind of cinema simply doesn't appear. Mainstream festivals don't program it. Distributors don't buy it. The label, at least, opens a door.

He's right about the diagnosis. Not about the solution.

A well-intentioned ghetto is still a ghetto. Visibility that isn't accompanied by real access to the mainstream circuit produces recognition without power: inclusion statistics that don't shift the hierarchy. The Black filmmaker ends up trapped in a parallel circuit where they are celebrated with fewer resources and excluded from the competition that distributes reputation and money. The trench, over time, becomes a permanent address.

The problem isn't the word. It's the architecture.

Festivals, selection criteria, the cultural capital that decides what is “universal” and what is “specific”—that’s what needs to be discussed. A Black director making science fiction, an Indigenous filmmaker working with auteur fiction, a Pacific collective experimenting with narrative time: none of them fit into “the community” without betraying themselves. And yet the label affects them all the same, because it doesn’t describe their work. It describes what the system doesn’t know how to process otherwise.

Fanon wrote it more than sixty years ago with different terminology: the zone reserved for the colonized does not recognize their difference, it administers it.

That there are funds, workshops, and differentiated policies to support production in historically excluded territories: good. That this production, once completed, enters the same film circuit with the same criteria: also good, and necessary. These are two distinct things that have been conflated into a single label.

At the Quibdó Africa Film Festival, we don't program community cinema. We program cinema. Cinema made in Chocó, in Lagos, in Kinshasa, in the places the world insists on calling peripheries. We call them centers of a perspective that the dominant system still doesn't know how to interpret, not because it's inferior, but because it's more complex than the label allows.