As many African filmmakers cannot afford to visit festivals on other continents, CIFF was designed to provide an alternative for them to expose their works to domestic and international audiences.
The grand patron of this inaugural edition was Isatou Touray, and the theme was "African Cinema and Gender Valuation".
It took place in the Global Hands Development Hub, Manduar, West Coast Region.
[5] The Pan African Screen Awards (PASA) were founded in 2008 by Sankanu, and the ceremony took place for the first time during the 2008 Out of Africa Film Festival in Germany.
France-based Nigerian director Newton Aduaka won the main prize for his 2007 film Ezra on the Sierra Leone Civil War.