MARRAKECH, Morocco — Artist Julie Mehretu’s BMW Art Car is set to land at the Marrakech International Film Festival as the visual centerpiece of a new push to empower African filmmakers and media artists, Nov. 26, 2025. By turning a 24-hour endurance racer into a rolling manifesto — then building workshops, screenings and new productions around it — Mehretu and her partners are betting that cultural heat can become real infrastructure.
How Julie Mehretu is turning a BMW Art Car into a film pipeline
The machine at the center of this moment is the No. 20 BMW M Hybrid V8, the 20th BMW Art Car unveiled at the Centre Pompidou and engineered for the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Julie Mehretu has described the project as a “performative painting,” the kind of artwork that’s meant to be finished at speed — “only completed once the race is over.”
That friction — stillness versus motion — is what makes the Art Car feel less like branding and more like a live experiment. In a behind-the-scenes Vanity Fair interview, Julie Mehretu said she “actually tried to turn it down” before a track-side visit rewired her thinking. The final livery reads like a glitching map: layered images and marks that hit differently when parked than when the car is tearing past at full throttle.
Now, the Art Car is doing more than turning heads. Julie Mehretu has teamed with Emmy-nominated producer Mehret Mandefro and BMW to launch the African Film and Media Arts Collective, or AFMAC — a long-term workshop network built to connect makers, mentors and resources across the continent. In BMW’s AFMAC launch description, Mehretu frames the ambition bluntly: “I wondered how I could make the Art Car a symbol and vocal archive” for African creativity.
AFMAC’s program blueprint lays out five labs across Lagos, Dakar, Tangier, Nairobi and Cape Town, plus an online film archive meant to stay accessible beyond the tour. Workshops already completed in Lagos, Tangier and Nairobi are meant to feed new film productions — and, ultimately, a shared anthology that can travel as both screening program and exhibition-ready work.
From race track to red carpet in Morocco
AFMAC’s biggest public stage so far is Marrakech. BMW’s festival update says the Art Car will be presented on the festival grounds alongside selected works and workshop impressions from AFMAC lead artists, including Zeresenay Berhane Mehari, Wanuri Kahiu, Jim Chuchu and The Otolith Group. The Marrakech International Film Festival runs Nov. 28-Dec. 6 and features 82 films from 31 countries, with director Bong Joon-ho heading the main competition jury, according to BMW.
What makes the Julie Mehretu project stand out is the continuity — and the escalation. A 2010 WIRED story followed South African artist Esther Mahlangu’s 1991 BMW Art Car as it headed to New York’s Museum of Arts and Design, proof that African visual languages have long belonged in the series. And as Architectural Digest reported in 2016, BMW has repeatedly used the Art Car platform to fuse art-world prestige with motorsport spectacle. AFMAC is the sharp new twist: a deliberate shift from “look at this” to “learn, make, ship.”
What success looks like for Julie Mehretu’s AFMAC experiment
For Julie Mehretu, the measure won’t be likes or lap times. It will be what gets made — and who gets to make it — after the festival lights dim: new films, a usable archive, and a durable network that can outlast the tour and culminate in the planned Cape Town exhibition. If AFMAC delivers, the loudest thing about this Art Car won’t be the engine. It’ll be the pipeline it built.
