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Film Africa praises itself for being “London’s biggest festival celebrating the best African cinema from across the continent and diaspora” (see the website). It was co-founded in 2011 by South African researcher and filmmaker Professor Lindiwe Dovey, based at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and Zambian-Scottish singer and songwriter Namvula Rennie. The festival was hosted annually from 2011 to 2020 by the Royal African Society (RAS) in association with SOAS.
Lindiwe Dovey and Namvula Rennie co-directed the first two editions of the festival, being Lindiwe Dovey also the Film Programme Director. Ever since, Film Africa relied on guest curators, appointed for specific editions. From 2020, RAS decided to switch the periodicity from an annual festival to a biennial festival, alternating it yearly with its sister festival, Africa Writes, also hosted by RAS.
The festival, usually running for up to ten days from the last weekend of October, brings a wide-ranging film programme, accompanied by a series of workshops, Q&As, talks, panel discussions, masterclasses, family days, dine and view screenings and music performances across a wide range of venues in London, including The Ritzy (Brixton), Hackney Picturehouse (Hackney), Rich Mix (Shoreditch), the BFI Southbank (Southbank), The Frontline Club (Paddington), and Screen on the Green (Islington), with variations per year. When it opened for the first time in 2011, the Hackney Picturehouse had the festival as its major launch event.
The programme included a focus on African Women, with Sarah Maldoror as the guest of honour, for the screening and discussion of Sambizanga (1972), known as the first feature film made in Africa by a female director. This was complemented by several themes, such as ‘Resistance and Cultural Memory’, ‘Music’, ‘Family Life’, and ‘Migrations and Returns’, which allowed mediating the films not just as ‘African’ by as cinema, informed by the very rich and diverse cultural heritage of the various regions within the continent and its diasporic communities. This thematic curatorial approach has continued over time, informed by the films produced and submitted to the festival.
Film Africa is one of the five UK-based African film festivals affiliated to the TANO network. This was founded in February 2013 at FESPACO, one of the longest running African film festivals based in the continent, in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso). ‘Tano’ is the Swahili word for five, and it was adopted in 2015 as the umbrella name of the UK’s five biggest African film festivals, Africa in Motion in Scotland, Afrika Eye in Bristol, the Cambridge African Film Festival, Watch-Africa in Wales, and Film Africa, in London. Through the signed declaration, these independently curated and managed festivals commit to collaborate in their shared mission of promoting African cinema throughout the UK through sharing films and touring African film directors; joint publicity and funding applications, promoting the screening of African cinema films on all platforms and formats by all means possible.
We are grateful to Film Africa for the access provided to trial this methodology, being available to us for the implementation of the Decolonial Test and follow-up focus group, and for the range of spaces and resources shared with us for the purpose of this project. Special thanks to the Deputy Director of RAS and director of Film Africa, Desta Haile, who was our main festival contact when we sent the invitation letter to be a festival partner.
We selected Film Africa as part of our research sample taking into account the short length of this research project and our previous knowledge and involvement in this festival. This raises attention to the need to consider positionality in research, as stressed in our research method and consequent outputs. Film Africa was co-founded by one of our research collaborators, Professor Lindiwe Dovey, in the same year in which the CO-PI of this project, Dr Estrella Sendra, and another research collaborator, Dr Robin Steedman, were her SOAS MA students in the postgraduate optional module ‘Aspects of African Film and Video’, then renamed ‘African Filmmaking: From the 1960s to the Present’. This module, would also be delivered from 2019 to 2020 by Estrella Sendra, when she was working as Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at SOAS.
Despite its disappearance in the present, Lindiwe Dovey has shared an open access toolkit about it, available in the Screen Worlds website, entitled ‘The Story of African Film’. In 2011, Lindiwe Dovey, who adopts a curatorial approach to teaching and learning, involved her class members in the first edition of Film Africa in various capacities. This is how both Robin Steedman and Estrella Sendra started to be involved in Film Africa, as volunteers adopting different roles, including, in the case of Robin Steedman, the post of Deputy Manager and Submissions reviewer, in later editions. Based on this experience, Estrella Sendra would direct the Cambridge African Film Festival in 2014 and 2015, thus collaborating closely with Film Africa, as part of the shared resources and curated strands with the TANO Network. In 2022, both Estrella Sendra and Lindiwe Dovey were invited to join the Advisory Board of Film Africa, sharing insights with fellow members on potential opportunities, events and creative solutions to challenges at Film Africa. This background has greatly facilitated access and informed our research process, allowing us to assess the extent to which the test was able to offer insights on decolonising curatorial and managerial practices at Film Africa that we may have already been aware of through our previous practice and engagement with the festival.
Below, there is a chart outlining the researchers involved in the pilot implementation of this test in Film Africa.
Robin Steedman and Estrella Sendra, with research participants via Zoom, 27 February 2023.
Participants included:
