Periodic Reporting for period 3 - AFRISCREENWORLDS (African Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film and Screen Studies)
Período documentado: 2022-06-01 hasta 2023-11-30
Dr Agina led on the organisation of our workshop 'Decolonising Film and Screen Studies in Nigeria', which took place at the University of Lagos (16-18 March 2020), bringing together 20 of the most eminent as well as early career film professors from across Nigeria. Dr Thomas organised a pioneering Ethiopian film retrospective የኢትዮጵያ ፊልም ትዝታዎች (ቅኝት) in Addis Ababa (29 March to 3 April 2021), bringing 2,000 people together, including filmmakers, policy-makers, government officials and the general public; it attracted widespread media attention in Ethiopia and has led to a request for it to continue in the future. We have also stimulated public conversations around African and other marginalised “screen worlds” through twelve curated events hosted from SOAS.
We put out global, open calls for participation in our two edited volumes. Twenty participants took part in our four online workshops in 2020 to co-develop the edited volume 'African Screen Worlds', which theorises 'screen worlds' from African perspectives, and also foregrounds the rich work being done by many early career African film scholars based within Africa. We also selected and ‘paired up’ approximately 30 film scholars (both early career and established) from East Asia, Latin America, North America, Africa and Europe to participate in nine online workshops in 2021 to co-create our ‘Global Screen Worlds’ edited volume through cross-regional, comparative, co-authored analysis. We also put out an open call for submissions of work on decolonising film to curate and publish on our Screen Worlds website; so far we have published a conversation between Dr Albertine Fox and Senegalese filmmaker Katy Lena Ndiaye, and between Moroccan filmmaker-scholars Yasmine Benabdallah and Rim Mejdi.
The PI published a creative research article 'On Teaching and Being Taught: Reflections on Decolonising Pedagogy' in the green open access journal PARSE in June 2020, focusing on the need to incorporate positionality and lived experience in our academic work. This article has been viewed hundreds of times on the PARSE website, included in syllabi, and been one of the reasons the PI has been invited to speak at multiple events across the world (for example, in South Africa, India, Pakistan, and Sharjah). The PI and Senior Researcher Professor Kate Taylor-Jones have edited a special issue 'The Asian-African Film Connection: Cross-Cultural Imaginaries, Shared Sources, Parallel Histories' for the green open access journal 'Open Screens'. We have also produced decolonising film teaching toolkits which have generated a great deal of interest from film scholars; our toolkit on Ethiopian cinema has been downloaded 796 times and was cited in UNESCO’s 2021 report ‘The African Film Industry: Trends, Challenges and Opportunity for Growth’.
We are hoping that our 'Contemporary African Screen Worlds' and ‘Global Screen Worlds’ volumes will soon be published. Once completed, our various research films will begin their dissemination journey with submission to film festivals, research film awards, and other screenings. The PI has a forthcoming chapter "Toward Decolonised Film Festival Worlds" (co-authored with Dr Estrella Sendra) in the book 'Rethinking Film Festivals in the Pandemic Era and After' (2022). Dr Agina has a forthcoming chapter "Nigerian film audiences on the internet" in the "Routledge Handbook of Popular Culture" (2022), and a forthcoming article "Cinema-going in 1970s Ibadan" for the journal Participations. We have engaged with the media in relation to issues relevant to our project (for example, the Guardian, BBC and local platforms in Africa), and our team will continue to present our work to both academic and non-academic audiences – for example, we will discuss decolonising filmmaking at the 19th Tarifa African Film Festival of Spain on 31 May 2022.