Electric Africa VR Festival 5 - 11 November 2020

Electric Africa VR Festival is the first, free, online virtual reality festival in Africa. Online for one week only from 5 - 11 November 2020 at https://www.electricsouth.org/electric-africa/ and you don’t need a headset to view the 360 experiences.

Born out of a commitment to build audiences in Africa for immersive content, the programme showcases the work of African artists working in virtual reality both on the continent and in the diaspora, alongside international works of narrative fiction and non-fiction.

No one gets left behind! All works in our programme are available to view even without a headset. Through our partnership with webXR platform LucidWeb our programme is optimized for your desktop, mobile phone and virtual reality headset and gives you 360 functionality no matter your device.

A chance to discover new voices, new dimensions, new realities, a new focus and new histories, we welcome a new wave of 360 videos to come from Africa including Another Kind of Dying: Virtual Experience (South Africa), A Visit at Cissé Films (Mali/France), Daughters of Chibok (Nigeria) and the World Premiere of Gr8ness (South Africa). International works include Ferenj: A Graphic Memoir in VR, by Ainslee Alem Robson, which enjoys its African Premiere at the festival after its inclusion in Tribeca’s Cinema360 programme and SXSW earlier this year. Ferenj is an afro-surrealist VR dreamscape that explores the meaning of “home” and reclaims the director’s Ethiopian-American mixed-race identity. Visit our website for the full programme in our first edition of the Electric Africa VR Festival.

The festival is geo-blocked to Africa, however, our industry programme is free and open to the public, available to audiences worldwide. Join us for live talks with directors, producers, leaders in creative technologies, acclaimed artistic teams and the thinkers helping to ensure the inclusion of voices and stories in immersive media to come from the global South. Webinars take place daily and panelists include founder of Kenya’s BlackRhino VR, Brian Afande; Judith Okonkwo of Imisi3D, XR creation lab in Lagos, Nigeria; Daliso Ngoma, founder of African Technopreneurs, providing the best AR/VR/360 camera hardware in South Africa and co-organiser of the monthly virtual reality meetup WeARVR Jozi. Antoine Cayrol, co-founder of France’s leading VR company AtlasV and producer of ATOMU, together with its directors Shariffa Ali and Yetunde Dada, alumni of the 2017 Digital Lab Africa acceleration programme, will discuss their pioneering participatory movement piece which formed part of the official selection of the New Frontier Exhibitions at Sundance Film Festival 2020

Electric Africa VR Festival is proudly presented by Electric South, an NPO based in Cape Town, South Africa that provides mentorship, production services, funding and exhibition for a network of artists across Africa exploring their worlds through immersive, interactive storytelling using virtual and augmented reality, and other digital media.

Supported by the South African Department of Sports, Arts and Culture, the National Film and Video Foundation of South Africa, the Bertha Foundation, French Institute of South Africa and LucidWeb.

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For more information contact:

Antoinette Engel, Electric South, Distribution Manager: [email protected] / +27 79 367 5887 Tarha McKenzie, Electric Africa, Festival Manager: [email protected]