A Renaissance of Reclamation - Film, Technology, and the Making of a Global Cinematic Agenda

Film, Technology, and the Making

of a Global Cinematic Agenda

 Ent-Tech (Innovation & Discovery Expo) x Afro-Mosaic Cinema Summit

Presented by the Alma Film Festival

Each year, the Alma Film Festival extends its work across two distinct but interconnected cultural geographies: the Dominican Republic in March and Atlanta in the fall. Together, these gatherings form a year-round platform for cinema, scholarship, cultural diplomacy, and creative economy development.

This fall, the festival comes to Atlanta with Ent-Tech (Innovation & Discovery Expo) x Afro-Mosaic Cinema Summit, a four-day convening designed to examine the future of storytelling at the intersection of history, technology, culture, and global systems change. Taking place Wednesday, September 30 through Saturday, October 3, the event positions Atlanta not merely as a host city, but as a strategic site for inquiry, exchange, and institutional imagination.

The fall program opens on Wednesday, September 30 with the Alma Experience Opening Event, setting the tone for a week centered on cultural strategy and relationship-building. On Thursday, October 1, the Afro-Mosaic Cinema Summit: The Crown Symposium on 1526 will be co-produced with Dr. Samuel Livingston, Morehouse professor in the Africana Studies Department.

On Friday, October 2, the summit continues with Developing a Global Cinematic Agenda, a forward-facing session shaped by special presentations from organizations, institutions, and thought leaders across the Global South. The week concludes on Saturday, October 3 with Ent-Tech (Innovation & Discovery Expo), a platform exploring the rapidly evolving relationship between entertainment, technology, access, ownership, and cultural production.

For Anthony R. Page, Ecosystem Architect of the Alma Film Festival, the Atlanta gathering reflects a broader shift taking place across global cultural communities. “Across the coalitions we are building — now reaching more than 140 stakeholders across 56 cities and 36 countries — we are witnessing something significant,” Page says. “People are taking back greater command and control of their narratives. They are telling stories through cinema that feel more authentic, more accurate, and more complete. They are not simply seeking visibility. They are owning the narrative itself.”

That movement, Page argues, is not confined to one region or one cultural tradition. It is emerging across Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, Central and South America, and the South Pacific — regions too often discussed through frameworks created outside of their own lived realities. “What we are seeing,” Page says, “is what I would call a Renaissance of Reclamation. There is a larger global idea taking shape, and the Alma Film Festival is entering that conversation with intention, humility, and a desire to build real infrastructure around it.”

What distinguishes this fall gathering is not simply its range of programming, but its central proposition: that cinema can no longer be understood only as an art form or an industry. It must also be read as infrastructure. Film and media shape memory, identity, policy, tourism, economic development, education, and international perception.

In an era defined by artificial intelligence, streaming saturation, fragmented attention, and shifting global markets, the question is no longer whether storytelling matters. The question is who has the capacity to shape the systems through which stories circulate, generate value, and influence the future.

The Afro-Mosaic Cinema Summit was created to address that question. Rather than approaching cinema through the narrow lens of premieres, panels, and professional networking, the summit frames film as a field of cultural intelligence. It brings a rich variety of stakeholders into structured dialogue around the conditions that determine whose stories are financed, distributed, preserved, studied, and taken seriously. Its purpose is not simply to celebrate representation, but to interrogate the architecture behind it.

The Thursday symposium, The Crown Symposium on 1526, grounds this inquiry in historical consciousness. By centering 1526 as an intellectual point of departure, the program asks how early histories of displacement, resistance, sovereignty, and cultural formation continue to inform contemporary questions of identity and creative power. Its collaboration with Dr. Samuel Livingston reflects the festival’s commitment to scholarship as more than a supporting element of cultural work.

Here, scholarship becomes a method of seeing, a discipline of accountability, and a framework for public imagination.

Friday’s summit session, Developing a Global Cinematic Agenda, moves from historical grounding to institutional strategy. This conversation will examine how creative communities across the Global South and diaspora might build stronger models of collaboration, circulation, and shared value. Special presentations from Global South organizations, institutions, and thought leaders will bring regional intelligence into the center of the discussion, ensuring that the conversation is not simply about global cinema, but informed by those actively shaping it from within diverse cultural and economic contexts.

The significance of this approach lies in its refusal to treat the Global South as a category of need, novelty, or extraction. Instead, the Alma Film Festival positions the Global South as a site of theory, innovation, authorship, and market intelligence. This is a crucial distinction. Too often, international cultural programming frames underrepresented regions as sources of content while leaving the deeper systems of valuation unchanged. The Alma model seeks to move beyond visibility toward agency, beyond inclusion toward infrastructure, and beyond access toward authorship.

For Page, this is where the idea of the Renaissance of Reclamation becomes most urgent. “There is a powerful shift happening in how communities see themselves and how they choose to be seen,” he says. “The work is not only about correcting incomplete stories. It is about building the conditions for people, places, and cultures to define themselves with greater authority. Cinema becomes one of the instruments through which that reclamation becomes visible, organized, and shared.”

That same concern drives Ent-Tech (Innovation & Discovery Expo). As entertainment and technology become increasingly inseparable, questions of access, ownership, and ethical design become central to the future of the creative economy. The expo is designed to examine how emerging tools, platforms, and business models are reshaping production, distribution, audience engagement, and monetization. Yet its deeper focus is not technology itself. Its focus is power: who builds the tools, who controls the platforms, who benefits from the data, and who is positioned to participate in the next phase of media innovation.

For Atlanta, the significance of this gathering is especially resonant. The city occupies a singular place in the cultural and economic life of Black America. It is at once a film production hub, a center of higher learning, a base of civic leadership, a technology market, and a symbolic capital of Black institutional imagination. The fall event builds from that ecosystem while extending its reach outward — toward the Caribbean, Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, and the wider Global South.

In this sense, Ent-Tech (Innovation & Discovery Expo) x Afro-Mosaic Cinema Summit is not simply an event series. It is part of a broader attempt to design a more serious cultural infrastructure around film and media. The work is animated by the Alma Film Festival’s six pillars: Conversation, Connection, Community, Collaboration, Cultural Diplomacy, and Collective Growth.

Page describes the fall gathering as part of a larger global conversation. “We see this convening — Ent-Tech (Innovation & Discovery Expo) and the Afro-Mosaic Cinema Summit — as an entry point into a much larger conversation,” he says. “In everything we do, we hope those conversations lead to meaningful connection. From those connections, we believe a deeper sense of global community can emerge. And from that community, organically, we hope to see greater collaboration, deeper cultural diplomacy, and more collective growth.”

These pillars are not decorative values. They function as an operating philosophy for building durable relationships across borders, disciplines, and markets.

The Alma Film Festival’s March gathering in Las Terrenas, Samana, Dominican Republic, creates an experiential environment where cinema, place, and cultural exchange converge. The fall Atlanta gathering extends that work into the realm of analysis, strategy, and innovation. One is rooted in destination and encounter; the other in systems and design. Together, they form a complementary model for what a contemporary film festival can become when it refuses to limit itself to exhibition.

At a moment when the entertainment industry is being reshaped by technological disruption, global audience shifts, and urgent questions of cultural ownership, the need for new frameworks is clear. The Alma Film Festival is not merely asking how more voices can be added to existing systems. It is asking how new systems might be imagined, built, and sustained.

That is the promise of Ent-Tech (Innovation & Discovery Expo) x Afro-Mosaic Cinema Summit: a gathering where history and innovation are not treated as opposites, where scholarship and industry are placed in direct conversation, and where the future of cinema is understood as a global, ethical, and institutional question.