Emerging Filmmakers Masterclass: June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive 

SAT 19 OCT 2024
Past event

Join us for a filmmaking masterclass led by June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive (JGPACA).

This masterclass is aimed at emerging filmmakers, scholars, artists and anyone interested in engaging with cultural memory and history through archives.

We will be exploring the creative strategies filmmakers, curators and writers have adopted with utilising archive material.

Workshop structure:

• An introduction to the June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive
• Viewing archival material in selected filmmakers’ works and discussing their practices
• Looking at a selection of displayed materials from the JGPACA collection
• Participants will also have the opportunity to share their own archival work with the group
• Open discussion throughout the day
• Time for reflections / Q&A at the end of the session.

The session will be led by Dr June Givanni (Film Curator and founder of JGPACA) and Damilola Lemomu (Filmmaker, Film Programmer and Archive Coordinator at JGPACA).

Attendees of the masterclass are invited to join the Sharri Petti film screening and conversation at 4pm.

ABOUT

The June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive, holds a unique collection of artefacts and archival material that has at its core the interest of PanAfrican cinema and its relationship to Black British cinema and culture. Our events and projects reveal histories and ideas in African and African diasporic film, bringing together the work of filmmakers, artists, and writers around a wide range of themes, debates, and interests. As a “living archive”, JGPACA aims to make accessible these valuable resources—films, audio recordings, photographs, scripts, posters, documents, publications, and memorabilia—and to provide a nurturing environment for their exploration by scholars, cultural activists, and members of the wider community. JGPACA runs a programme of regular events ranging from regular free-to-attend film screenings to public debates and host various community-based projects. Their mission is to safeguard marginalised histories expressed and engaged through the moving image and related materials and to re-activate them in the context of contemporary debates.

Dr June Givanni is a BAFTA Award-winning pioneering international film curator who has considerable experience in film and broadcasting for over 30 years and is regarded as a resource for African and African diaspora cinema. The development of the June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive is based on her collections from years of working in the field of cinema. Her motivation for the archive is to make this valuable heritage collection as widely accessible as possible. In the early 1980s, June was involved in bringing Third Eye, London’s first Festival of Third World Cinema, to London. She worked as a film programmer at the Greater London Council’s (GLC) Ethnic Minorities Unit, at a key development stage for Black British Independent cinema, and Black British art and culture generally. Givanni ran the African Caribbean Film Unit and edited the quarterly Black Film Bulletin; and the book Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image at the British Film Institute. She also programmed Planet Africa at the Toronto International Film Festival over four years. She has worked as a film curator with festivals on five continents and has been involved in key moments in the development of PanAfrican cinema on these continents, and the development of the links between them.

Damilola Lemomu is a filmmaker, researcher, and film programmer. Working predominantly with archives, her work explores intersecting ideas between identity, migration, and place. In 2021, she won the Learning on Screen Postgraduate Award for her graduate film, Promised Land (2021) which premiered at Flatpack Film Festival. Past work also includes: Pram Town Revisited (Gibberd Gallery, 2022); Changing Landscapes (Kupfer, 2022) and Occupy Tottenham (The Guardian, 2023). She is co-organiser and film programmer for Otherfield Film Festival in East Sussex. Damilola has been part of the June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive (JGPACA) team leading the development of the archive’s public programme and managing the archive’s collection. This can be seen through a wide-range of programming that JGPACA has produced from Per Ankh – The June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive’ at Raven Row (2023), a regular monthly screening programme at their archive base at MayDay Rooms to ‘What They Do Next…’ a video installation, archival display and live screening of Mark of the Hand Aubrey Williams (1987, Imruh Bakari) as part of The Archive is a Gathering Place, held at TATE Modern.