As co-directors and founders of the African Diaspora Film Festival, a 17-day annual exhibition of films held in New York every November, Diarah N’Daw-Spech and Reinaldo Barroso-Spech spend a substantial portion of the year on the road scouting films to program. Since inaugurating the ADFF in 1993, they have shown material selected from Cannes, the Toronto Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, the BFI London Film Festival, and a score of others.

“We usually start the year with Sundance,” Ms. N’Daw-Spech said.

Okay, so how did Sundance go this year? “It was a nightmare,” she joked. “I saw a lot of excellent films there. I was very impressed.”

The difference between Sundance the experience and Sundance the marketplace is an essential distinction for a husband and wife team that has, in less than 15 years, built the ADFF into the biggest and most influential film festival of its kind.

This weekend, BAMcinématek will host the fifth edition of “The Best of the African Diaspora Film Festival,” an annual series of screenings highlighting the best-received ADFF entries shown at last year’s festival. The current “Best of the ADFF” streamlines 87 entries from 30 countries into a greatest hits package of 21 films. The common link they share is that they, in the words of the festival’s mission statement, “redesign the black cinema experience and strengthen the role of African and African-descent directors in contemporary world cinema.”

There are perhaps 30 film festivals in America built around black filmmakers, but, Ms. N’Daw-Spech said, “This notion of ‘African-American’ doesn’t acknowledge the work of black people from other places.” Her own roots lie in France and the West African nation of Mali. Mr. Barroso-Spech was born in Cuba to Haitian and Jamaican parents. “Because we’re both American and foreign-born,” Ms. N’Daw-Spech said, “there was a need to communicate, to say ‘Hey, there’s not one way to be black, there’s not one black experience.'”

But back to Sundance. “It’s an interesting scene,” Mr. Barroso-Spech said. “There were a couple of African films this year, but they were completely overlooked. They have no play in the festival, yet still the filmmakers’, the producers’, even the agents’ expectations are so high that they have no interest in a comparatively small black film festival — until nothing happens.”

Despite the occasional success story, the majority of filmmakers who screen at Sundance and other high-profile marketplace festivals return home with little more to show for their trip than a gift bag. In the thin-air and high-stakes film market, it seems as if the distinction between displaying one’s creative wares in the brightest light and displaying them in the best light gets forgotten. At specifically themeand content-driven smaller festivals like the ADFF, a film’s actual merits, rather than its presumed lack of commercial possibilities, can come back into focus.

In the close to 15 years the ADFF has been in existence, it’s become more than what Ms. N’Daw-Spech modestly described as, “a niche festival.” ADFF screenings have spawned sales and distribution deals for films that were ignored at Sundance and the prominent cinema confabs. And with a nearly full season of New York-based film festivals all competing for the best in international cinema, the ADFF has had to grow to survive.

As local film festivals like Tribeca, New Directors, and the New York Film Festival increasingly shift their programming gaze abroad to emerging or reinvigorated national cinemas outside the mainstream, the ADFF has found itself competing directly for films of merit.

“Dry Season,” a revenge fable based in present-day Chad that screens in the current “Best of,” claimed the Jury prize at the Venice Film Festival last year. “Everybody in NYC wanted to show that film,” Ms. N’Daw-Spech said. “The only way we could get it was to buy it.”

Responding to demand from other film festivals facing confused access routes to works that are literally scattered all over the globe, the ADFF now purchases and distributes many of the films it exhibits. “If people have interest in these films, then why not create the structure to make them easy and available?” Ms. N’Daw-Spech said. “Filmmakers wanted us to represent them here. We had a film from Venezuela with English subtitles, and the director told us, ‘Why don’t you hold onto it. I don’t need a print with English subtitles.’ Other festivals would get in touch with us to see how to acquire films we’d shown, so we gradually created a distribution company.”

She summed up the festival’s and distribution arm’s curatorial onus as an attempt to “select films that have production value and have a story that’s well told — films that open a window to a different world that people aren’t usually exposed to or don’t get a chance to know about.”

But that general, though vivid, description barely hints at the wide range of material that cooks down into the annual BAM survey. Not surprisingly, the crucial word is diversity. “We consciously shape the festival around narratives versus documentaries, English versus foreign-language films, U.S. versus Latin American and Europe,” Ms. N’Daw-Spech said.

This year’s documentary focus is on the African musical influence in South America. “Maria Bethania: Music Is Perfume” is a boundlessly affectionate portrait of a singer as famous in her native Brazil as her fellow Tropicale music pioneer peer, Gilberto Gil. “Sons of Benkos” and “Hands of God” document the ecstatic contemporary evolution of African rhythms in Colombia and Peru, respectively.

In addition to “Dry Season” narrative entries in BAM’s “Best of” program include British-Nigerian filmmakers Ngozi Onwurah and Sharon Foster’s “Shoot the Messenger” and American Tim Alexander’s “Diary of a Tired Black Man,” two films that challenge notions of black identity and the nature of political correctness in the black community.

On the heels of this year’s Oscar buzz for Clint Eastwood’s “foreign language” film “Letters From Iwo Jima” and Sundance’s recognition in 2004 of “Maria Full of Grace” and this year of prize-winner “Padre Nuestro” — two Spanish-language films made by Anglophone directors — Ms. N’Daw-Spech makes a case for artistic globalization at work in the entertainment world. “It’s like America wants it all,” she said, before detailing her admiration for the filmmaking in “Padre Nuestro.”

“You see all these international entries that are made by American filmmakers abroad. Where do emerging international filmmakers get a chance to have their voices heard?” It would appear that through the African Diaspora Film Festival, its distribution arm, and outreach efforts, where they go is Brooklyn.

Through February 21 (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).