The Nova Frontier Film Festival 2025 is a film incubator and showcase for the Global Majority ~ filmmakers from the African Diaspora, the Middle East, and Latin America. It’s co-presented by Harlem Stage.
Nova Frontier Film Festival 2025
Harlem Stage
The Nova Frontier Film Festival 2025; an incubator and showcase of African Diaspora, Middle Eastern, and Latin American film; explores the choices we make on the long road to freedom with a spotlight on female filmmakers and women-centered films; at Harlem Stage in Manhattanville, West Harlem, Manhattan; with afterparties with live music from Thursday-Saturday, June 5-7, 2025. From $25. All-Access Freedom Pass $60. Go all in. Freedom is worth the price. harlemstage.org 🇺🇸 🇧🇪 🇬🇧 🇨🇴 🇫🇷 🇬🇳 🇮🇷 🇲🇽 🇲🇦 🇵🇷 🇸🇳 🇪🇸 🇹🇷 🇨🇴
Opening Night
The Nova Frontier Film Festival 2025 opens with four short films about freedom from Iran, Spain, Senegal, and the UK. The evening ends with a reception with live music by Gambian Senegalese griot and kora master Malang Jobarteh; at Harlem Stage in Manhattanville, West Harlem; on Thursday, June 5, 2025 at 7pm. From $25. All-Access Freedom Pass $60. Go all in. Freedom is worth the price. harlemstage.org 🇬🇳 🇮🇷 🇪🇸 🇸🇳 🇬🇧
Friday Night
The Nova Frontier Film Festival 2025 continues with “Souleymane’s Story (L’Histoire de Souleymane)” by Boris Lojkine, a 2024 Cannes Jury Prize winner about a Guinean immigrant working towards his asylum hearing in France. It’s followed by a conversation with Soraya Hosni, an anthropologist and Yale World Fellow who studies the impacts of exile, and live traditional Moroccan music by Imal Gnawa; at Harlem Stage in Manhattanville, West Harlem; on Friday, June 6, 2025 at 7pm. From $25. All-Access Freedom Pass $60. Go all in. Freedom is worth the price. harlemstage.org 🇬🇳 🇫🇷 🇲🇦
Closing Day
The Nova Frontier Film Festival 2025 closes with a full day beginning with a series of short films about unbelonging, mostly by female filmmakers from Senegal, Türkiye, Iran, Belgium, and France at 1pm. Next at 4pm is a conversation about resistance led by Nova Frontier Film Festival co-founder Billy Gerard Frank. There are also screenings of films from Haiti, USA, with a spoken word performance by Cito Blanko of the Bronx. The festival ends at 7pm with a screening of “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” by Raoul Peck, a 2024 French documentary about Ernest Cole, a photographer who documented apartheid in South Africa before his exile in the United States where he documented Black life in New York City and the American South. It’s all at Harlem Stage in Manhattanville, West Harlem; on Saturday, June 7, 2025. From $25. All-Access Freedom Pass $60. Go all in. Freedom is worth the price. harlemstage.org 🇺🇸 🇫🇷 🇭🇹 🇿🇦
Most of the films are shorts. The festival includes films and performances from or about: African American, Belgian, British, Colombian French, Guinean, Iranian, Mexican, Morrocan, Puerto Rican, Senegalese, Spanish, and Turkish lives. There are receptions with live music after the screenings. Go for the films, and stay for the community. It’s Harlem Stage!
Life is full of ups and downs, and especially now that the world has entered a period of instability and social turmoil. The important thing is not what happens to us, but how we respond. There is a lot of suffering in these films, but also a diverse range of solutions that allow the characters to overcome whatever life sends their way. These are really inspiring movies and in one or more, you may find yourself in another part of the world.
This festival is very timely as many of us in the world are still trying to get free, and many of us who have been free, are now losing our hard-won freedoms. The path to freedom can be impacted by big choices, but small choices can tilt the balance too. The worst choice is no choice at all because that leads to freedom slipping away. And if you think your neighbor’s freedoms aren’t worth protecting, you’re wrong. If our neighbors lose their freedoms, we are probably next. It’s time to be our brother’s keeper.
Nova Frontier Film Festival
The Nova Frontier Film Festival was founded in 2016. It is both an incubator and a presenter.
It’s concept of the Global Majority in the African Diaspora, Middle East, and Latin America is largely where the African Diaspora is concentrated. Of course, Mother Afrika begins with Indigenous Africans. Arabs started the monsoon trade between East Africa and India, developed the Sahara trade in North Africa, and a coastal trade all around Africa, so we have a lot of cross-cultural pollination between Arabs and Africans. The Colonial Era brought many African cultures to the Americas which blended with the cultures of Indigenous Americans and European colonizers into what we call Latin culture. Many elements that we today consider to be Latin culture and even American culture, actually originated as African culture. In the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, some Haitians and Dominican Puerto Ricans speak Arabic. That’s the long tale of this whole African Diaspora-Arab connection. It survived 500 years in secret at home. Even the Puerto Rican pandereta or plena drum, which most consider an Afro-Puerto Rican instrument, was originally an Arab drum. We are way more African (and Arab) than we have been taught.
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