We Live in a Dog’s World, but Cinema Still Barks

At airports, dogs sniff suitcases for white powder; in Bogotá’s parks, they replace children; in Parisian living rooms, they replace friends. We live in a dog’s world, I said the other day, and the most ironic thing is that, amid this overdose of kibble and Italian leather leashes, Afro-descendant cinema still finds the strength to bark.

Screening film in open space Quibdó © QAFF 2022

That’s where the Quibdó Africa Film Festival (QAFF) comes in. A festival born in a tropical, improbable city. Quibdó, capital of Chocó, where the rain falls as if God simply forgot to turn off the faucet in the sky. A city absent from official postcards, yet where the Atrato River winds like one of García Márquez’s endless sentences. And it was precisely in this “periphery” that, seven years ago, we planted the roots of a festival dreaming of connecting the shores of Africa and its diaspora.

Why an African film festival in Quibdó? people ask me sometimes, raising an eyebrow like a snobbish critic at greasy popcorn. I could answer with statistics, geopolitical analysis, or academic citations… But the truth is simpler: because it was impossible, and therefore necessary. Because a white screen stretched out in the rain can, for an instant, abolish invisible borders the theme of this year’s edition. Because where the State arrives late, cinema shows up on time.

QAFF 2025 brings 71 films from 32 countries and territories: rough documentaries, experimental visual poems, playful animations, feature films that haunt your sleepless nights. Here we travel from Lagos to Pointe-Noire, from Medellín to Kinshasa, from Salvador da Bahia to Cali, from Luanda to corners Google Maps hesitates to recognize. This festival doesn’t just screen films it unsettles, amuses, provokes.

Most of our screenings are free a rare luxury in a world where even bottled water comes at a price. But free doesn’t mean worthless. Our audiences often leave with dilated eyes, as if a dose of critical consciousness had been injected straight into their retinas. And believe me, that’s not an unpleasant side effect.

This year we speak of “Invisible Borders.” Not the lines a GPS traces with surgical precision, but the ones installed in our heads: prejudices, stereotypes, inherited silences. Invisible like the line that still separates, in certain minds, “noble” art from “community” art. Invisible like African history in European schoolbooks or Afro-Colombian history in Bogotá’s.

But a festival is not a mass, nor a collective therapy session. Here there will be laughter, rhythms, debates, festival romances, coffee spilled on white shirts, and nights far too short. The films are the excuse; the conversations, the true treasure. Because if cinema is image, a festival is connection.

To those who still believe Africa is a country, we offer a poetic visa to 32 different territories. To those who think diasporas are only nostalgia, we show they are mostly invention. And to those who doubt Quibdó could ever be a cultural capital, we answer with a packed screening on a Tuesday afternoon, where neighborhood kids discover for the first time that a film can speak to them too in their accent, with their pain, with their laughter.

QAFF has no red carpets unless you count the red mud after a storm. It has no yachts, but it has canoes. No champagne flutes, but viche, our artisanal sugarcane spirit, served with pride enough to outshine any cocktail. And above all, it carries a promise: to make you cross those invisible borders, no passport or visa required just your eyes wide open.

So in this dog’s world, where we often confuse entertainment with anesthesia, the Quibdó Africa Film Festival persists, seven years later, in barking against indifference. And that bark, believe me, sounds suspiciously like music.