Periodic Reporting for period 3 - AFRISCREENWORLDS (African Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film and Screen Studies)
Période du rapport: 2022-06-01 au 2023-11-30
AFRISCREENWORLDS is addressing the lack of accuracy, nuance, and inclusivity in Film and Screen Studies because of the historical marginalisation of African film, filmmakers, and film theorists. Our main objective is thus to conduct in-depth research on contemporary African films, filmmakers, and film industries, and to try to situate them within global film cultures. On a theoretical and conceptual level, the project is exploring how one of the most dominant concepts in Film and Screen Studies over the past two decades – the concept of “world cinema” – has paradoxically contributed to the marginalisation of African film and filmmakers. AFRISCREENWORLDS is instead theorising the concept of “screen worlds”, 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 diversity. This more expansive concept has also 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, and to take account of the impact of new technologies on film production and circulation globally. AFRISCREENWORLDS is also addressing the relative dominance of text-oriented approaches within our field, despite the fact that we research an audiovisual medium. We have thus been making films and video essays that centre Africans, African films, and African film industries, and that are also, crucially, made in collaboration with Africans.
Post-doctoral fellow Dr Michael W. Thomas has made 'Addis Screen Worlds', a 70-minute research film, and the first documentary about the vibrant, commercial Amharic-language film industry in Ethiopia. 'Behind my Nollywood Screen' is a 45-minute research film made by post-doctoral fellow Dr Añulika Agina, and the first documentary to focus on film exhibitors' role in the Nigerian film industry. The PI Professor Lindiwe Dovey’s films about African women filmmakers are in production, and highlight the Kenyan filmmaker and Docubox founder Judy Kibinge and the South African film producer Bongiwe Selane. Post-doctoral fellow Dr Nobunye Levin's 30-minute film and video essays on "decolonising screen worlds" are in the development phase and will be made over the next year.
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’.
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 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 scholars, mostly in Africa and Asia, which will hopefully last well into the future. Our team has 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 have also used the challenge of not being able to curate in-person events as an opportunity to explore the creative curation of online film screenings and discussions; this has 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.
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.
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.