Periodic Reporting for period 4 - AFRISCREENWORLDS (African Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film and Screen Studies)
Reporting period: 2023-12-01 to 2025-03-31
AFRISCREENWORLDS addressed the lack of accuracy, nuance, and inclusivity in Film and Screen Studies and the mainstream film industry because of the historical marginalisation of African film, filmmakers, and film theorists. The project’s main objective was thus to conduct in-depth research on contemporary African films, filmmakers, and film industries, and to try to put them more into conversation with global film cultures – especially Asian film cultures – to construct a far more expansive and realistic understanding of contemporary filmmaking. On a theoretical and conceptual level, the project explored how one of the most dominant concepts in Film and Screen Studies since 2000 – that of “world cinema” – has paradoxically contributed to the marginalisation of African film and filmmakers. AFRISCREENWORLDS instead coined and theorised the concept of “screen worlds”, proposing it as a heuristic to think through the complex realities of screen media texts and contexts in our contemporary era with greater attention to issues of representation and technological change. This more expansive concept allowed us to engage with a far greater range of filmmaking practices, embracing the kinds of “festival films” characteristic of “world cinema”, but also popular, commercial filmmaking (such as that emanating from contemporary Nigeria and Ethiopia), and to take account of the impact of new technologies on film production and circulation globally. AFRISCREENWORLDS also addressed the relative dominance of text-oriented approaches within Film and Screen Studies despite the fact that we research an audiovisual medium. In addition to traditional research outputs (e.g. co-edited volumes, book chapters, and journal articles), the team thus also made films and video essays that centre Africans, African films, and African film industries, and that have also, crucially, been made in collaboration with Africans. Other outputs included decolonising film toolkits for teachers, activist position pieces, engagement with the media, and multilingual, multi-media conversations about decolonising film shared on our website. The project has transformed our discipline of Film and Screen Studies by making it impossible to leave African film and filmmakers out of the frame (in terms of both research and teaching) and by providing ethical, equitable, decolonised methods through which film scholars based in the Global North can collaborate and co-produce knowledge with film scholars and filmmakers in the Global South. It has also increasingly been having an impact on the mainstream film industry, making it more inclusive.
Major outputs include the co-edited volumes ‘Contemporary African Screen Worlds’ (Duke UP, 2025) and ‘Global Screen Worlds’ (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2025). We held major dissemination events for these volumes at the 2024 African Studies Association of the UK conference and the 2025 British Association of Film, Television, and Screen Studies conference. Both volumes were developed through decolonial research methodologies and a caring, collaborative culture. We made seven audiovisual outputs: five films (‘Dreaming is Serious Work’ [dir. Levin, UK/South Africa], ‘Cine-Addis’ [dir. Thomas, Ethiopia/UK], ‘Behind my Nollywood Screen’ [dir. Agina, Nigeria/UK], ‘Out of the Box’ [dir. Dovey, Kenya/UK], and ‘From One Woman to Another’ [dir. Dovey, South Africa/UK]), and two video essays (‘Reverie’ [dir. Levin, with Palesa Shongwe, UK/South Africa] and ‘From Hindu to Habesha’ [dir. Thomas, with Sonal Kantaria, UK]). Five of these outputs can be accessed on our website since they have already had their festival/competition run; two of them are still being submitted to festivals/journals. The quality of our audiovisual outputs has been validated by the film festival and university screenings, nominations, awards, and media coverage they have gained in different parts of the world (see Awards section for nominations and prizes our films have won, and especially ‘Reverie’). Further highlights are: ‘Behind My Nollywood Screen’ premiered at the 2022 iREPRESENT International Documentary Film Festival in Lagos; ‘From One Woman to Another’ premiered at the 2023 ARIFF film festival in Johannesburg; ‘Out of the Box’ received £20,000 from the SOAS impact fund to hold the Nairobi premiere, where the screening was widely covered by the Kenyan news media (television and print); ‘Out of the Box’ had a California tour, including at Stanford University and in Hollywood; ‘Cine-Addis’ was invited to the University of Oxford and was selected for the 2024 Kingston International Film Festival, where it was a finalist for the Eadweard Muybridge Prize. Dr Agina organised the workshop ‘Decolonising Film and Screen Studies in Nigeria’ at the University of Lagos (16-18 March 2020), bringing together eminent and early career film professors from across Nigeria and beyond. Dr Thomas organised a pioneering Ethiopian film retrospective in Addis Ababa (29 March to 3 April 2021), bringing together 2,000 people, including filmmakers, policy-makers, government officials and the general public; it attracted widespread media attention in Ethiopia and led to a second edition in February 2023 alongside a major workshop on decolonising film studies at Addis Ababa University at which the PI and SR also taught African and Japanese cinema to students and filmmakers. We launched our website soon after the beginning of the project and we used it throughout to share calls for participation, resources, and our research with film scholars, filmmakers, and the general public. We stimulated academic, industry, and public conversations around African and other marginalised “screen worlds” through more than 50 curated in-person and/or online events (information about these can be found on the Announcements and Film Events sections of our website). We also published multilingual, multi-media work on decolonising film on our Screen Worlds website; produced ten decolonising film teaching toolkits which are likely to be referenced in a REF2029 impact case study about AFRISCREENWORLDS; and presented at dozens of university conferences, workshops, and film festivals around the world (the PI has given 12 invited keynotes).
We see decolonising as being as much about changing our ways of conducting research as it is about changing what we are conducting research on. Our methodologies have thus attempted to challenge and transform certain tendencies in Higher Education by fostering and nurturing a caring, collaborative, conversational, creative and curatorial approach rather than a colonial, competitive, canon-oriented approach. This has also helped to bring into being a global community of early career researchers, mostly in Africa and Asia, which will hopefully last well into the future. Our team also used the challenges presented to us by the COVID-19 pandemic to innovate our research methods. We used the fact that we had to change the way we were making our films to further decolonise our filmmaking, allowing more Africans to tell their own stories. We also used the challenge of not being able to curate in-person events during COVID-19 as an opportunity to explore the curation of online film screenings and discussions; this had the benefit of allowing us to welcome large, global audiences to our events, to keep our costs and carbon footprint low, and to film the zoom recordings to share with others through our website.