Colonial Reels: Histories and Afterlives of Colonial Film Collections Discussion

Colonial Reels: Histories and Afterlives of Colonial Film Collections is a three-year research project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. This event, organised by the project lead, Jacqueline Maingard, Associate Professor in Film at the University of Bristol, and the project team, puts colonial film collections in conversation with the Pan African cinema archive.

We will introduce the project and discuss its contours and challenges and will screen examples of short colonial films or footage held in the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection, British Film Institute, Royal Anthropological Institute, and Wellcome Collection, the project’s four partner archives. You can also expect excerpts from key exemplars in African cinema history, for example, films directed by Mati Diop, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Ousmane Sembene and Abderrahme Sissako. There are also several African and Black diaspora films screening in the wider Cinema Rediscovered programme.

Guests for the Colonial Reels event include June Givanni, a world-renowned, award-winning expert in African cinema and its histories, and founder and director of the June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive; and Amanda Egbe, artist, filmmaker, researcher and Senior Lecturer in Media Production at the University of the West of England.

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