Tuesday 10 October, 5.30pm
Weston Library, Sir Victor Blank Lecture Theatre
Free, limited spaces, sign up here.

In this opening event of the ‘Decolonisation in Motion’ film season, we explore how and why filmmaking became a weapon of African anti-colonial movements from the late 1950s onwards as well as a tool of nation-building in newly independent states. The talk will be interwoven with a series of rarely seen film shorts, including Pierre Clément’s Sakiet-Sidi-Youssef (1958), René Vautier’s Algeria in Flames (1958) [courtesy of Moira Chappedelaine-Vautier] and Paulin Soumanou Vieyra’s A Nation is Born (1961).

With Walid Benkhaled (Bodleian Library), documentary maker and specialist in post-colonial cinema, and Natalya Vince (University College, Oxford), historian of decolonisation in the Francophone world.

Tuesday 17 October, 5.30pm
1966, 120 mins, director: Gillo Pontecorvo
Weston Library, Sir Victor Blank Lecture Theatre
Free, limited spaces, sign up here.

The Battle of Algiers is seen to be such a realistic depiction of the urban guerrilla warfare between the French army and the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) between 1956 and 1957 that it continues to be presented with the disclaimer that no archive footage was used in its making. But this is no straightforward snapshot, and this film by Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo (1919-2006) raises important questions about how nationalist histories are written, the relationship between history and memory and the roles and representation of women.

The presentation and discussion of the film will be with Walid Benkhaled (Bodleian Library) and Natalya Vince (University College, Oxford), who have extensively researched the production of the film. Natalya Vince has also interviewed a number of women who participated in the actual “Battle of Algiers” for her book Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, Memory and Gender in Algeria, 1954-2012 (2015), winner of the 2016 Women’s History Network Book Prize.

Wednesday 25 October, 5.30pm
1966, 55 mins, director: Ousmane Sembene
Weston Library, Sir Victor Blank Lecture Theatre
Free, limited spaces, sign up here.

The directorial debut of acclaimed Senegalese author and filmmaker Ousmane Sembene (1923-2007) is about a young Senegalese woman, Diouna (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), who moves from Dakar to work for a white French couple. Released six years after Senegalese independence and long before French films about ‘the immigrant experience’ became a genre, Black Girl explores what it means to be ‘post-colonial’ through the lens of a West African director whose life story was entangled with anti-colonial struggles and the challenges of post-colonial state-building.

The presentation and discussion of the film will be with Lyn Kouadio and Mobeen Hussain, both Beacon Junior Research Fellows in Postcolonial and Race Studies at University College. Mobeen Hussain’s research focuses on race, gender, medicine, and the colonial legacies of consumption, material cultures, and economic exploitation in the British empire and Lyn Kouadio’s work interrogates the politics of transitional justice in African post-conflict contexts.

Wednesday 1 November, 5.30pm
1972, 97 mins, director: Sarah Maldoror
Weston Library, Sir Victor Blank Lecture Theatre
Free, limited spaces, sign up here.

Sambizanga is the work of Franco-Guadeloupean filmmaker Sarah Maldoror (1929-2020) and is about the Angolese independence struggle – which was still ongoing when the film was released. It follows a young woman trying to find out information about her husband, who had been arrested by the Portuguese authorities, in an incident which would prompt a nationalist uprising. Like The Battle of Algiers, Sambizanga features many non-professional actors – in this case members of the Angolan Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and anti-colonialists from Congo, where the film was shot.

The presentation and discussion of the film will be with Ruth Shoo, historian and cultural studies scholar working on the intellectual and social history of pan-Africanism (Faculty of History, Oxford) and Dan Hodgkinson (Department of International Development, Oxford), historian of West and Southern Africa who, amongst other projects, recently interviewed Maldoror’s daughter for a special issue which he is co-editing on African revolutionary filmmaking.

Tuesday 7 November, 5.30pm
1994, 127 mins, director: Moufida Tlatli
Weston Library, Sir Victor Blank Lecture Theatre
Free, limited spaces, sign up here.

This historical drama, which Tunisian director Moufida Tlatli has described as inspired by the life of her mother, explores the lives of two generations of women living in a palace under the French protectorate. Released 38 years after Tunisian independence, in a country whose post-colonial leaders presented themselves as women’s rights reformers whilst limiting women’s autonomous organisation, the film explores the class dimensions of women’s social and sexual oppression and their forms of resistance.

Tuesday 14 November, 5.30pm
1969, 102 mins, director: William Klein
Weston Library, Sir Victor Blank Lecture Theatre
Free, limited spaces, sign up here.

For our season finale, we will be screening the William Klein’s Algiers Pan-African Festival (1969). In July 1969, while western audiences were glued to their TV screens watching the first landings on the moon, thousands of artists and politicians from across the African continent and diaspora were looking in a very different direction. They had gathered in Algiers for the first Pan African Cultural Festival, speaking and performing to audiences of hundreds of thousands. Charting the festivities and euphoria as well as intense debates about the future of African politics and culture, it features – amongst many others – Nina Simone, Archie Shepp and Miriam Makeba.

The discussion panel will include contributions from Walid Benkhaled (Bodleian Library, expert on Algerian cinema), Peter Brooke (African Studies Centre, scholar of mass media, politics and culture in Africa), Lyn Kouadio (University College, Beacon JRF in Postcolonial and Race Studies) and Ruth Shoo (University of Oxford, historian and cultural studies scholar working on the intellectual and social history of pan-Africanism).