King's College London

UNREST: A new agenda for African film heritage restitution

This £1.1 million project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, will engage an international team of scholars, archivists and filmmakers in research on African film heritage restitution. The project was incubated during by Professor Erica Carter’s 2024 King's Global Cultures Institute Fellowship; it will be led by Professor Carter with co-investigators Dr Dan Hodgkinson (Oxford), and Dr Samar Abdelrahman (Liverpool).

Unhousing Restitution: African audiovisual heritage between displacement and return (UNREST) will research and disseminate new, Africa-led and practice-oriented methodologies and models for restitution of displaced African film heritage. For twentieth-century anti-colonial movements and postcolonial states, cinema was a key medium for articulating and popularising decolonisation. Yet years of resource poverty and political inaction have left a film heritage landscape marked by neglect and material destruction. Many of the newsreels, documentary and feature films that captured the major events and experiences of the decolonisation years are either lost, or sequestered in the archives of the Global North. Only a handful of African states boast national film archives; UNESCO concluded in 2021 that African cinema’s “best surviving elements” are “almost never found in Africa.”

For two years from January 2026, UNREST researchers will work with ten international partners to identify and disseminate Africa-led solutions to this egregious cultural loss. Bringing together an interdisciplinary research team from film studies, African history and digital humanities, and a partner network spanning Cairo, Accra, Tamale, Berlin, Khartoum and London, UNREST will develop and test new approaches to audiovisual heritage restitution, from collaborative historical research to community digital archiving and creative reuse. Focusing on case studies from Sudan (the archive of exile artist-filmmaker Hussein Shariffe) and Ghana (50 early post-independence films from the Ghana Film Industry Corporation), the project will pioneer approaches to digital repatriation, and run two landmark creative projects of reclamation. Two year-long creative labs will be led by award-winning Sudanese, Egyptian and Ghanaian filmmakers and artists; they will engage dispossessed and displaced communities in reimagining the art and scholarship of African moving image archives. The project will move restitution debates from a focus on the politics of return, to practices of shared transnational history-making, collaborative infrastructure development and African-led creative renewal.