Controversial from the very first one, Mussolini’s nationalistic showcase in 1938 Venice, film festivals traditionally provided needed exposure, perhaps international distributor pick-up, for shoestring indies and subtitled imports. With success, name festivals mushroom into galas, not infrequently losing their “alternative” roots and goals, while those “niche” exhibition programs that stick to their guns are left to scramble for the wherewithal with which to survive and maintain their integrity.

One such is the African Diaspora Film Festival, which, on top of special events and its Summer Series, last year expanded its sixteenth annual November-December edition to be more accessible viewer-friendly by including six independent-minded and institutional venues up and down Manhattan. American films being primarily commercial ventures from the earliest days, from previous experience in their own countries and in the Paris where they met, Reinaldo Barroso-Spech and Diarah N’Daw-Spech realized that even New York did not then offer the same wide cinema scope as, say, Paris or Montreal.

As backbone for the festival which they would start up, they chose the common human link forged out of the African continent’s varied societies and history as acted upon by colonialism and neo-colonialism. This does not mean race but roots, as in, for example, Australian Aborigine-hero The Tracker, ideological documentary Cuba: An African Odyssey; studies of Josephine Baker, Muhammad Ali and violence amidst Jamaican music; and Portuguese-language Omiradouro da lua, about a white who emigrates from Angola upon its independence only to discover that he is African after all.

That is, the concentration was to be on the shared relationship of certain people coming from one culturally diverse source but then shaped in different places and traditions. From its founders’ experience in language teaching, specifically the use of film as a pedagogical device, the ADFF and its offshoots has had from the beginning an educational goal. “People of African descent are in general not even aware of the word diaspora,” much less its very real implications.

In New York and Paris, ArtMattan Productions was started up in 1993 with a little personal cash and a single publicist to help. The following year, its homegrown film distribution wing was inaugurated, making the Festival quite unique but also involving great additional effort and in many cases leading to impasses with movie-theater bookers and managers. Often boasting their own built-in venues, and with deep-pockets sponsors, celebrity attendance, guaranteed media and industry coverage, and thus highly sought-after public screenings, the biggie festivals can afford to shore up images with a couple as yet distributor-less entries.

Embraced by neither industry nor “film intelligentsia,” African Diaspora Film Festival remains a demanding “labor of love” for its two founding officers, for university student Administrative Assistant Clemencia Acevedo -- their specialist in Latin American and youth offerings -- and new marketing publicist Wendy Robinson. The bulk of outside funding still comes from government agencies, with supplementary support from Columbia University Teachers College, but the reward is in audience members’ eagerly asking when and where for next year, rather than whether or not.

“Crazy people that we are,” they have continued in the face of, say, the failure of major distribution for gems like The Tracker with David Gulpilil, their discovery The Journey of the Lion, which got front-page coverage on Brooklyn’s City Sun, or Angela Bassett in Gospel Hill, and Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation, personally introduced by its iconic director Charles Burnett.

Finances have their demands, and so meganames are absent at these screenings of films that, unlike those of many “black” festivals, are not limited merely to U.S. and Continental works with the occasional dash of Cuban. “Walking that fine line” for its entire existence, ArtMattan is not about to change its course despite “a felt high degree of hostility to the films it brings into the market and to the Festival . . . and to [series like last month’s] ‘Music and Soul of the African Diaspora.’” Often choosing probably controversial works from the thousand-plus they annually view, the Spechs and Acevedo seek presentations that “entertain intelligently and not stupidly; if there is laughter, not buffoon works to laugh at us, but with us.”

With the dumbing down of cinema culture worldwide and not only here, where “a Spike Lee might not make it today.” exhibitors and bookers are fiercely concentrated on dollars and cents, and “bookers are ‘strong gatekeepers.’” In the consideration of political economist and film critic Jesse Algeron Rhines, “Regardless of race or gender, the main goal is making money.” However, even with the prevailing vicious circle of double standards, bookers who may not respond, verbal agreements that are reneged on, and theater managers uneasy with small distributors who promise to bring in their own audiences, the ADFF and ArtMattan continue, grow and hope.

The effort is worth it when yesterday’s schoolchildren attendees show up in today’s grown-up audiences; when a diversity of venues (some of them partnering) attracts a larger diversity of viewers; when those viewers discuss and purchase from the variety of ArtMatten DVDs; and when the product results in thought, talk and enjoyment. Too often “dismissed[ed] as mere entertainment,” maintain Hernán Vera and Andrew M. Gordon, “cinema yet has profound effects, shaping our thinking and our behavior.” Adds Douglas Kellner, “Movies manufacture the way we see, think of, feel, and act towards others.”