Judging Criteria

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Films submitted to the official competition of the Quibdó África Film Festival are evaluated through a decolonial lens, one that places the Afrodiasporic cosmovision at the centre of critical judgment, rather than at the margins of a universal standard that was never designed to hold it. The criteria below are drawn from the intellectual traditions of Édouard Glissant (La Relation, Opacité, Créolisation) and Frantz Fanon (the decolonised subject, the politics of the gaze, the sovereignty of Black pleasure), and from the master arc of QAFF 8: from the shadow that was imposed, to the light that is chosen.

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SELECTION CRITERIA

 

Originality 

We do not judge originality against the master narrative of Western cinema. A film is original at QAFF when it refuses pre-existing templates for Black story — when it speaks from a place so particular, so rooted in a specific cosmovision, that it cannot be fully translated into another tradition without loss. Originality, in this sense, is an act of sovereignty.

Ask: does this film carry a signature that belongs to no one else, and to no other tradition?

 

Creativity

The effective use of imagination is not assessed in the abstract. We are asking: from which well does this film draw? Creativity rooted in Afrodiasporic experience — in the griot tradition, in communal memory, in the aesthetics of survival and refusal — carries a different weight than mere formal novelty. The most creative films at QAFF are those that make visible what has never been seen before, because the tradition that produced them has never been allowed on screen.

Ask: does this film expand what Afrodiasporic cinema can look like, feel like, sound like?

 

Plot  

Narrative logic is not singular. The Aristotelian arc — conflict, rising action, climax, resolution — is one structure among many, and not necessarily the most truthful to Afrodiasporic experience. Non-linear structures, circular temporalities, griot-style narration, and rhizomatic storytelling are all fully valid at QAFF. A plot is strong when it serves its story's truth — not when it conforms to a universal template that was never universal to begin with.

Ask: does the narrative architecture emerge from the film's world, or is it imposed upon it?

 

Stimulation and structure

Structure is political. How a film is built — what it reveals early, what it withholds, where it places its silences and its eruptions — is already an argument about how the world works. In the context of NOIR, we ask whether the structure itself enacts the journey from imposed shadow to chosen light. A film that uses conventional structure to arrive at an unconventional truth is as valid as one that invents its own form. What matters is intentionality: every structural choice should be a choice, not a default.

Ask: does the structure serve the film's decolonial argument, or contradict it?

 

Characters 

Fanon's warning is the jury's primary test here: does this character exist to be explained to others, or does she exist for herself? Multi-layered means carrying the full weight of political subjecthood — complicity alongside integrity, joy alongside grief, refusal alongside exhaustion — simultaneously and without apology. We are particularly alert to characters who begin inside the colonizer's frame of value and cross, through rupture or revelation, into a sovereignty of self. That crossing — when it is earned by the film's body, not declared from outside it — is the most powerful arc in the Afrodiasporic tradition.

Ask: would this character recognise herself in this film?

 

Cinematography

The visual grammar of a film carries its politics. We evaluate cinematography for its relationship to the Afrodiasporic body and landscape: does the camera look with recognition, or with curiosity? Does it expose, classify, and aestheticize — or does it witness? In the tradition of NOIR, we honour visual work that understands light and shadow as ancestral rather than merely atmospheric, that treats the texture of Black skin and the geography of Afrodescendant territories as subjects in their own right. Excellence in cinematography, at QAFF, means a gaze that could only have been made by someone who belongs to this world, or has learned to see it from the inside.

Ask: whose eyes are behind this camera, and to whom is this image addressed?

 

Sound quality

Technical clarity of dialogue is a baseline. But the politics of sound are the politics of listening. We ask not only whether voices are audible, but whose voice carries weight in the mix. Who is heard, and who becomes ambient? Sound design that places Afrodiasporic voices at the centre — that treats them as the norm, not the exception — is already a political act. Equally, deliberate silence can be one of the most powerful sonic choices in a film: silence that withholds, that mourns, that refuses to perform itself for those who are not meant to hear.

Ask: whose voices are centred in this soundscape, and what does the silence contain?

 

Musical score 

Music is not decoration. In the Afrodiasporic tradition, music is archive, argument, and testimony. We evaluate the score for its relationship to cultural memory — whether it draws from living traditions (marimba, rumba congolaise, mbalax, cumbia, delta blues, coupé-décalé), transforms them through creolization, or creates something genuinely new from their encounter. A score is strong at QAFF when it could not have been made by anyone else, from anywhere else — when it functions as its own character, carrying knowledge the image alone cannot hold.

Ask: does this music know where it comes from, and does it take that inheritance somewhere new?

 

Entertainment value

We refuse the Eurocentric binary that sets entertainment against political art. A film that moves an Afrodescendant audience to laughter, to tears, to solidarity, to recognition — that is political. Joy is a decolonial act. Pleasure is a form of resistance. We are not looking for films that are entertaining despite their politics, or political despite their pleasure — we are looking for films that understand that for Black audiences, the right to be fully entertained, without having their pain instrumentalised or their joy tokenised, is itself a claim on the world.

Ask: does this film give its audience the full range of what it means to be alive?

 

Dialogue

Code-switching, multilingualism, untranslated speech, and deliberate silence are not defects — they are the formal signature of creolized identity. Dialogue is authentic at QAFF when it refuses to perform itself for an outside ear, when it trusts that its audience does not need to be explained to. Voices that carry the particular music of Quibdó, of Kinshasa, of Cali, of Abidjan, of Salvador da Bahia — voices that would lose something essential in translation — are the voices this festival exists to amplify.

Ask: does this dialogue exist for its characters, or for the audience's comfort?

 

Effectiveness of the message

The message must emerge from the film's body — not be declared from outside it. A film that explains its own politics is weaker than one that makes politics felt. The Fanonian test: does this film expand consciousness, or does it confirm what the audience already comfortably knows? We are looking for films that leave a mark — that change, however slightly, the viewer's relationship to the Afrodiasporic world. That change may be intellectual, emotional, somatic. It does not have to be resolved. The most effective films at QAFF often end in productive discomfort — in a question that cannot be immediately answered.

Ask: what will the audience carry out of the cinema that they did not bring in?

 

Call to action

Within the master arc of QAFF 8 — from the shadow that was imposed to the light that is chosen — the call to action is not necessarily activist. It may be interior. It may be a new way of seeing one's own face in the mirror. It may be the slow recognition that one's culture, one's language, one's community are not deficits to be overcome but inheritances to be honoured. A film answers this criterion when it leaves its audience with an altered relationship to their own Afrodiasporic identity — when it turns a gaze that was borrowed outward and aims it, finally, inward.

Ask: after this film, what becomes possible that was not possible before?