A Manchester film festival is being built around African philosophies of community and liberation, with organisers inviting submissions of up to 30 minutes from any genre and charging no screening fees.
The event sits within See My World’s year-round programme of pan-African arts, culture and events. It is planned as a day of pan-African and global majority films from the north of England, including exclusive premieres of documentaries the group has been developing.
Those writers rejected the colonial claim that African thought was inferior, stressed the importance of community, and treated the reclaiming of African ways of knowing as essential to a people’s understanding of itself.
That rethink, Adekoya said, comes from returning to pan-African histories and from thinkers whose work has entered the group’s practice, among them John Mbiti. “As works from thinkers like John Mbiti have come into our sphere, they have really emboldened us to think differently about our place in the world and what we do,” Adekoya said.
The organisers say the programme is meant to break with the usual festival model. “The idea is that we would go against the norm of how film festivals are, because when we think about decolonisation, we think about how structures have been created to alienate and exclude communities,” Adekoya said.
“That reflects how we constantly go back to pan-African histories to inform how we progress,” Adekoya said. “The whole idea is that it’s like a playground in search of strategies of liberation, using the festival as a way to explore different philosophies.”. “So we thought our film festival would look more at how we make film accessible and how stories that deserve to be seen get seen,” Adekoya said.
Adekoya said the premieres “weave together expressions of liberation through art forms like poetry and dance.”.