The FCAT aims to spread knowledge about African film production by exhibiting a representative wide variety of audiovisual African works every year: from the classics to more innovative and recent films, from documentaries to feature length fiction films, from South Africa to Morocco and from Senegal to Ethiopia.
Last May, internationally acclaimed Guinean filmmaker Mama Keita commented: "The FCAT is a mirror facing Africa." Similarly, the highly celebrated and Cannes-awarded Malian-Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako insisted on the importance of an African film festival like FCAT, hailing it as "a bridge that politicians never make."
Offering €48,500 in prize money through eight different awards, the festival in Tarifa aims to embody both an innovative cultural bridge - in which African films become the encounters between the two continents and their different cultures, and "a tool for knowledge, raising of socialawareness and development", as Mane Cisneros Manrique, founder and director of the FCAT, explains.
