Afropean Moves

Afropean Moves is a ten-minutes documentary that captures the diffusion of African dance and music in Italy by focusing on the rise of African dance and music festivals in the country from 2010 to 2015. Drawing from extensive fieldwork conducted across northern and central Italy, the film provides a glimpse into the microcosms these festivals created and they significant cross-cultural exchanges and artistic networks that they enabled.

These festivals engaged participants in workshops, dinners, round-table discussions, and intercultural events that promoted the learning of West African dance and music in communitarian life settings. Dedicated entirely to African expressive arts and cultures, they emerged as popular events that attracted students and audiences from all over Italy and neighbouring countries. In doing so, they enabled interracial encounters in an otherwise difficult context for meetings between Italians and West African immigrants and created important networks for West African artists scattered around the country and Europe. Afropean Moves captures how these festivals reflected both the growth and favourable reception of West African diasporic communities in Italy at the time, and hint at how their decline coincided with a change in the political climate during the so-called ‘migrant crisis’.