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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