New
York-based writer and director Frances Bodomo will screen and talk about her film Afronauts (USA, 2014, 13 min).
It's July 16, 1969: America is preparing to launch Apollo 11. Thousands of miles away, the Zambia Space
Academy hopes to beat America to the moon in this film inspired by true events.
Inspired by true events, Afronauts
tells an alternative history of the 1960s Space Race. It’s the night of July 16 th , 1969 and, as America prepares to send
Apollo 11 to the moon, a group of exiles in the Zambian desert are rushing to launch their rocket first. They train by rolling
their astronaut, 17-year-old Matha Mwamba, down hills in barrels to simulate weightlessness. As the clock counts down to blast
off, as the Bantu-7 Rocket looks more and more lopsided, Matha must decide if she’s willing to die to keep her family’s myths
alive.
Frances Bodomo is an award-winning Ghanaian filmmaker. She grew up in Ghana, Norway, California, and Hong
Kong before moving to New York to study film at Columbia University (BA) and NYU's Tisch School of the Arts (MFA).
Her short films Boneshaker (2013) and Afronauts (2014) both premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and went on to play
at various festivals including the Berlinale, Telluride, SXSW, and New Directors/New Films. Afronauts received 5 Grand Jury
Prizes and will play at the Whitney Museum as part of the group show Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016. She
most recently directed the short segment "Everybody Dies!" for the omnibus feature Collective:Unconscious (2016) which won
Best Experimental Short at the 2016 BlackStar Film Festival. Frances is currently developing the feature version of Afronauts,
which is supported by the Sundance Institute, Tribeca Film Institute, IFP's Emerging Storytellers program, and the Alfred
P Sloan Foundation.
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