African Diasporans Hidden Kulture is an official selection at CineFem 14
African Diasporans Hidden Kulture has now screened on four continents.
We do not stop to count these very often. This one is worth counting.
Europe, at the Cannes Film Market in France in 2023. Africa, with Best Foreign Documentary Feature at the Inside Nollywood International Film Festival in Abuja, Nigeria, in 2024. North America, with Best Documentary Feature at The African Film Festival in Dallas that same year.
And now South America. In September, African Diasporans Hidden Kulture Part I: Jacksonville, Florida, directed by Nola D. Oracle, and co-produced by Nola D. Oracle and Sage Love was an official selection at CineFem 14 and screened at the festival in Punta del Este, Uruguay, held September 16 through 20. It is the studio's first step into the South American film market.
A Festival With a Point of View.
CineFem is billed as Uruguay's first international women's film festival. It began in Salto in 2013 and has made its permanent home in Punta del Este since. This year marked its fourteenth edition.
The festival exists for films directed by women and films that center women's stories. An international jury judges the competition, and this year's program brought together more than 60 films from 28 countries.
Being chosen out of a field like that is a statement about the work. Someone on another continent watched a documentary about Jacksonville and decided their audience needed to see it.
What Uruguay Saw
The film moves through Jacksonville's African American heritage one place at a time. LaVilla. Durkeeville. Kingsley Plantation. American Beach, the community MaVynee Betsch spent her life protecting.
Each of those places holds contributions by Africans and African Diasporans that the official record skipped over. The film puts them back.
Nola has said she made the work "because of my profound enthusiasm for researching the hidden aspects of African Americans." That curiosity is what an audience in Punta del Este was watching: a filmmaker digging into her own city and bringing back what she found.
What a Selection Opens Up
A festival selection matters for reasons that go past the screening itself. Festival programmers pay attention to what has played elsewhere. Distributors look for work that has already found an audience abroad. Partners want proof that a story travels before they help carry it further. Every festival on this film's record makes the next one of those conversations easier to start.
It is also part of a longer pattern. Ten years of independent filmmaking built the record that Uruguay just added a continent to.
Meanwhile, Back in Florida
While the film traveled, it kept working here too.
In January 2026, African Diasporans Hidden Kulture Part I: Jacksonville, Florida screened at the prestigious Saint Augustine Film Festival in St. Augustine, Florida. District Commissioner Cynthia Garris, who is poised to become the city’s first Black mayor in December, introduced Nola D. Oracle and the documentary before its screening to a packed audience.
In February, the documentary continued its journey with a screening at the Jacksonville Public Library, bringing the film back to the very city where it was produced and where its story began.
When it screened at the Lincolnville Museum in St. Augustine, one attendee said it should be in every school room. A segment of it anchored the James Weldon Johnson Young Writers Festival in Jacksonville, where students found history about their own city they had never been taught.
You do not need a plane ticket to see it. Part I rents in our film library, and schools, libraries, museums, and community organizations can bring it to their own audiences through our Educational Screening Program, with a live conversation with the filmmaker built in.
What Comes Next
Jacksonville was the first city. It will not be the last.
African Diasporans Hidden Kulture Part II: San Marcos, Texas takes the series to Texas, a city with its own hidden chapter of African American history. The trailer is up in our film library now.
Thank you for following this work as it travels. If it matters to you, send this post to one person who should see their own history on a screen, anywhere in the world.
Continue to chase change.
African Diasporans Hidden Kulture
Where the film has been
0 stops • 0 continents