Photo from JGPACA
Join us as Onyeka Igwe discusses her new book, June Givanni: The Making of a Pan African Film Archive
With Emma Sandon, Birkbeck, University of London and a director of the JGPACA
Wednesday 25 February 2026, 17.00 – 18.30 GMT on ZOOM
The June Givanni Pan African Film Archive contains thousands of films from Africa, the Caribbean and the diaspora amassed in over forty years. In her recent book, the author Onyeka Igwe offers a way to encounter Pan-African film through this study of the archive, conceptualizing it as a feminist counter-archive that foregrounds marginalized histories and proposes a radical approach to archiving itself. Using original oral history research with June and other key figures in Pan-African and Black British cinema, Onyeka uncovers the important role that women festival organisers, programmers and cultural workers have played in Pan-African cinema history. In this talk, she will also explore significance of the archive to her own work as a moving image artist.
Onyeka Igwe is interested in the prosaic and everyday aspects of black livingness. For her, the body, archives and narratives, both oral and textual, act as a mode of enquiry that makes possible the exposition of overlooked histories. Her installation, our generous mother, that explores the University of Ibadan, the oldest degree-awarding institution in Nigeria, is currently on display at Tate Britain. Her work has been shown internationally including at MoMA , New York, Jerwood Arts, ICA and the Venice Biennale.
Free but please register: email l.thynne@sussex.ac.uk
June Givanni: The Making of a Pan African Film Archive(2025)by Onyeka Igwe is published by Lawrence Wishart in the Radical Black Women Series
This event is presented by the Women’s Film and Television History Network.
WFTHN 