Nova Frontier Film Festival and LAB is a timely film and arts festival and interdisciplinary lab passionately committed to showcasing and incubating the works of filmmakers and artists from and about the African Diaspora, the Middle East, and Latin America—the Global Majority. The Interdisciplinary Lab, a core component of Nova Frontier’s praxis, educates and mentors youth and emerging filmmakers and artists in filmmaking and media arts from our festival regions, as well as from underserved and underrepresented communities.
Nova Frontier Arts promotes intercultural understanding and intellectual engagement through exceptional ongoing programming, including films, performances, new media arts, conversations, panels, and workshops that address critical social issues of our time while celebrating the diversity that surrounds us.
The annual Nova Frontier Film Festival takes place with our partner HARLEM STAGE in Harlem, New York. Harlem Stage is a global platform for performing artists of the Global Majority who dare to assert the artistic freedom that gives birth to new works and ideas—and, thus, a new world.
Since our inception in 2016, we have collaborated and partnered with organizations such as the Billie Holiday Theatre, Restoration Art, the Weeksville Heritage Center, and the Bronx Documentary Center, among others. Additionally, we are expanding our reach globally to cities like Marseille, France, and into new festival regions that serve as vibrant nexuses of cross-cultural exchange.
Our lab is conceived as an incubator and hub—a platform for educating and mentoring the next generation of emerging talents and young adults in the philosophy, skill sets, and distribution of independent filmmaking and new media. With a strong focus on emerging filmmakers and young adults, we strive to create an environment that fosters knowledge exchange, collaboration, and co-production while dissolving cultural boundaries—both conceived and preconceived—that separate us. We engage in productive rather than pernicious confrontations.
Moreover, the Film Lab helps participants find their unique voices, unleash their artistic talents, and develop specialized skills that can lead to future career opportunities in the film, media, and audiovisual industries.
“Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.”
— Jean-Luc Godard
“We are drawn to borders, not because they are signs or elements of the impossible but because they are places of passage and transformation. Relationship depends on the mutual influence of identities, be they individual or collective, and requires each identity to be distinct and independent. Relationship does not mean confusion or dilution. I can change by exchanging with the Other and still not lose or distort myself. That is why we need borders, not as places to stop at, but as the point at which we may exercise that right of free passage from the same to the Other; savour the wonder of here and there.”
