#2 - PanAfrican Film Archive

Programme

• You Hide Me (Nii Kwate Owoo, GH 1970, 16’)

  In 1970, Ghanaian filmmaker Nii-Kwate Owoo gained access to the underground vaults of the British Museum where he filmed You Hide Me, revealing for the first time the stolen and hitherto unseen Asante treasures and artworks sequestered there. Made with the support of London film collective Cinema Action, the resulting film has been recognised as a milestone in the postcolonial debate on restitution. In 2020, JGPACA ran a series of webinars to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of this important work in its archive.

• Statues Hardly Ever Smile (Stan Lathan, US 1971, 19’)

  Directed by Stan Lathan and produced by Chamba Productions for the Brooklyn Museum, this 16mm documentary captures the reappropriation of museum objects by a group of children from the local community, who have been invited into the museum to interact with and respond to these artefacts through the creation of performance art.

• Africa, the Jungle, Drums, and Revolution (Suliman Elnour, SU/SD 1979, 11’)

  Sudanese filmmaker Suliman Elnour was enrolled at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow when he made this student exercise. The film confronts Soviet perceptions of Africa after independence, combining archival footage found in Soviet archives with children’s drawings and interview snippets gathered on the streets of Moscow. Replete with clichés and stereotypes, the film is testament to the Elnour’s struggle to resignify prevalent images of Africa.

• Mémoire 14 (Ahmed Bouanani, MA 1971, 25’)

  Bouanani used found footage of documentaries produced by the French during the colonial period to make this strong anti-colonial essay film. While censored by the Moroccan authorities to just a fifth of its original running time, this film is a testament to the resistance of Morocco’s inhabitants and the memory of social and cultural practices never entirely extinguished by the colonial project.

• No Archive Can Restore You (Onyeka Igwe, NG/GB 2020, 6’)

  Filmed on the abandoned premises of what was once the Nigerian branch of the British Colonial Film Unit, Onyeka Igwe’s haunting short adopts a more sceptical attitude toward the colonial archive, questioning the limits of appropriation. Instead of recovering the decaying propaganda images she finds on site, Igwe focuses the space of the archive itself as a monument to ongoing colonial ruination.

• Guest: June Givanni

  June Givanni is a leading film curator and consultant in African and African diaspora cinema, having worked in the sector for over three decades. She came to the UK as a child from Guyana in 1957 and has worked as a curator in the field of PanAfrican cinema on four continents. Amongst other things, she ran the BFI's African and Caribbean Film Unit and was the founding editor of the Black Film Bulletin with Gaylene Gould. 40 years of curating and collecting, and working in the field generally has resulted in the setting up of the ‘June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive’, now run with her co-directors, filmmaker Imruh Bakari and Dr Emma Sandon.

• Guest: Nikolaus Perneczky

  Nikolaus Perneczky is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London, where he is working on a postdoctoral project titled Restitution and the Moving Image: Decolonising Global Film Heritage (2022-2025). Together with Cecilia Valenti, Nikolaus is currently working on an edited volume on the politics and ethics of global audiovisual archiving (Amsterdam University Press). He is also finishing a monograph titled Against Development: African Cinema as Worldmaking (Oxford University Press).