Data related to the article
Films related to Africa and African diasporas from the Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico – AAMOD (Audiovisual Archive of the Workers and Democratic Movements): https://aamod.it/filmoteca/. (see Cortini 2020, 147–81 for a full list of the materials related to Africa and African diasporas)
The material can be accessed online and on site: AAMOD, Via Ostiense 106, 00154 Rome, Italy [geo:41.8669797,12.4760486].
Nine films from this collection are presented in this article. See the final section, ‘List of videos featured in this article.’
- 1 It might be relevant to underline here that, after being one of the leading political forces in Ita (...)
1As a growing number of works published over the past ten to fifteen years have shown (Borruso 2009; Galeazzi 2011; Siracusano 2020), after the 1956 XXth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in which “Nikita Khrouchtchev recognized the legitimacy of ‘national ways to socialism’” (Siracusano 2022, 142), the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI) developed a significant and original relationship with a number of African liberation movements in different regions across the continent. Visual traces of these relationships, and of the complex web of interactions between the PCI and other Italian and international political movements supporting African liberation struggles can be found in the Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico – AAMOD (Audiovisual Archive of the Workers and Democratic Movements), based in Rome. Created in 1979 to store the audiovisual heritage of the PCI and, in particular, the materials produced by its official production company, Unitelefilm (Fantoni 2021), the archive progressively evolved into a much larger initiative disconnected from the Italian Communist Party, and became the home of a large collection of documents spanning well beyond the experience of the Party itself.1 Over time, the archive came to include materials produced and collected by militants and political organisations engaged in communist and socialist movements across the world, and became “one of the essential audio-visual archives for the history of Italian and international militant cinema” (Folens and Lancialonga 2021, 131). Today, the archive is home to a collection that includes more than 10,000 hours of film and 10,000 hours of videotape:
“which come from the most diverse sources. For the period between 1960 and 1970 [for instance, alongside Unitelefilms’ productions, the archive includes] many films signed by collectives and filmmakers from other countries: the films of the French militant groups SLON3 and ARC4, the anti-Franco reels of the Spanish director Helena Lumbreras exported clandestinely, the work of Argentinian filmmaker Fernando Birri.” (Ibid.)
2The collection also includes hundreds of hours of footage, completed films, audio and video reports shot around Africa by militants and political organisations, and thousands of pages of written materials related to each of these productions.
3This plurality mirrors the orientation of the Italian Communist Party in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, the party had developed its “own conception of communism, integrated into the doctrine of peaceful coexistence with the West and aimed at developing a socialism guided by the local particularities of the lands where it spreads” (Siracusano 2022, 142)—an open-ended orientation that was considered by the party to be particularly coherent with the spread of communism across the African continent (ibid.). As we will see in the next pages, this political orientation, including the “openness to struggles carried out outside Italian territory and to ‘heterodox’ political thoughts” (Folens and Lancialonga 2021, 132), is echoed in the visions of two of AAMOD’s key funding figures, the neorealist screenwriter Cesare Zavattini and the filmmaker Ansano Giannarelli.
4Based on these introductory elements, this essay presents and discusses some of the audio-visual sources (raw footage, audio and video recordings, feature films, short films, documentaries) related to African liberation movements and early independence state-building processes that can be found in AAMOD. It does so to highlight their potential contribution to the study of African revolutionary cinema, and more specifically, to the analysis of audio-visual memories of African liberation movements and political struggles in Africa and across the diaspora. As Aboubakar Sanogo (2022) reminds us, quoting Paolo Jedlowski’s work (2016), the archive is not only there to keep traces of the past, but also to make us discover the existence of “memories of the future.” As Jedlowski states, “memories of the future are recollections of what individuals and groups expected in the past […] what these recollections teach is that the future has never been imagined in a single way. But, showing that the past is a reservoir of possibilities, they suggest that the same is also true for the present” (2016, 128, quoted in Sanogo 2022, 46). The analysis of the materials kept in AAMOD presented in this essay highlights the productive potential of the “archival” (Sanogo 2022). That is, its capacity not only to make us discover fresh ways of looking at the past, but also, most importantly, new ways for imaging the future that could include some of the aspirations and ideals of past liberation movements and artistic initiatives. Through the analysis of the connection that exists between AAMOD’s archival materials and emerging initiatives (organised within AAMOD itself and beyond it—i.e. the Archivio delle Memorie Migranti) to preserve the memory of African migrants’ experience of crossing the Mediterranean Sea and living in Europe, this essay insists on the significance that archives can have for the imagination of new political futures.
5In its first part, the essay briefly presents the history of the archive and critically explores the political philosophy that organizes AAMOD’s collections. In the second section, the essay introduces three key thematic areas of relatively unexplored audiovisual materials that could be of interest to scholars and filmmakers working on African revolutionary films and movements: 1) archival materials about liberation movements in Lusophone African countries and on Réunion Island; 2) materials produced by or about the Eritrean Liberation Front; 3) materials about African migration to Italy and African workers’ movements in Italy, shot between the 1970s and 1990s, a period in which some of the key debates about African migration to Italy began to emerge and to crystallise. The essay insists particularly on these materials because of their originality and their representation of the archive’s variety and historical significance. The third and final part of the essay focuses on a specific example, the short documentary film A testimonianza di una condizione – 2000 eritrei a Roma (Federico Bruno, Giovanni Gervasi, Ali Reza Movahed, Paolo Rossato, Johannes Yemane, 1977), one of the earliest existing audiovisual documents about the Eritrean community in Rome, and a very interesting source to study the political organisation of African migrants in Italy in the 1970s. This example is discussed in relation to more recent attempts to develop audiovisual archives documenting the migrants’ experience of life in Europe, to highlight AAMOD’s potential to renewing archives’ role as agents of political transformation.
6Overall, the analysis presented in these three parts develops three interrelated arguments. First of all, through the discussion of AAMOD’s archival philosophy, it insists on the possibility of archives playing an active role in processes of political reimagination of collective identities and political experiences. Secondly, by highlighting the specific nature of the documents kept by AAMOD—mostly the result of the collaboration between African and European filmmakers and activists—it argues for an open and inclusive definition of what constitutes African revolutionary filmmaking, so as to highlight the role that internationalist networks played in its production and circulation. Finally, by focusing in particular on a few documents relating to the experience of African migrants in Italy, it argues for the role that archives like AAMOD can play in opening up the collective memory of European countries like Italy, by highlighting the long term history and multifaceted dimensions of African presence on the continent.
- 2 According to Letizia Cortini, the full list of funders includes: G. Arnone, C. Bernardini, G. Cesar (...)
- 3 At Centro Sperimentale di Cinematogafia, Zavattini was the teacher of key figures of Latin American (...)
7As mentioned earlier, AAMOD was created in 1979. It initially was an association and had a different name (Archivio Storico Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio - ASAMO), but in 1985 it was recognised by the Italian government as a foundation of national cultural interest, adopting the name used today. Among its founders, there were several important figures of the Italian Left, including politicians, artists and scholars such as Pietro Ingrao, Cesare Zavattini, and Ettore Scola.2 The first president of the archive, between 1979 and 1989, was Zavattini himself, a fundamental figure of Italian neorealism, one of the movement’s most important theorists and the screenwriter of several classic films produced in Italy between the 1950s and 1960s such as De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1948), among many others. Zavattini was a particularly influential figure among militant cinema avant-garde, thanks to the ideas he developed working with key neorealist filmmakers and teaching at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematogafia (Italy’s main film school, also based in Rome), where he played an important role in connecting neorealism with anticolonial and anti-imperialist cinematographic movements in different regions of the world (compare Francese 2007; Viganò 2023).3 He also played a significant role in connecting the Italian militant cinema avant-garde to their peers in France and the US via the formulation of artistic experiments such as the Cinegiornali liberi—an initiative launched by Zavattini in 1962 to produce collective films that combined audiovisual materials filmed by both professional and amateur filmmakers, in an effort to produce a cinema “by the people for the people” (di tanti per i tanti) that could lead to a “rebellion against contemporary regime’s monopoly of information” (Zavattini quoted in Folens and Lancialonga 2021, 138; see also Nanni 1998).
8Zavattini’s vision strongly influenced the way the archive was progressively structured. According to him, AAMOD had to be “an archive more of the present than of the past, and the valiantly collected materials [should not be] there on the shelves in an indeterminate wait, that is, becoming more and more an archive, according to the old vocabulary, but [should instead be] traversed by a lively eagerness to enter today’s dialectic of democratic struggles, to help create freer information from its roots” (Zavattini quoted in Carucci 2011, 13). Indeed, one of the key principles of the archive, from its inception, is to store audiovisual materials not simply to conserve them because of their historical value, but in order to promote their active (re)use, both as pedagogical resources and as the ground for creative reutilisation by filmmakers and artists: “a heritage that cannot be considered as such except through the possibility of its cultural use” (Scarnati 2011, 14; see also Giannarello 2011b). It is interesting in this sense to underline that the archive has a policy of free access to, and free use of, all the visual and written documents in its possession (most of which are available on the archive’s YouTube and Vimeo channels).4 It actively promotes found footage filmmaking through grants to filmmakers willing to engage with the materials stored in the archive and by co-organising a film prize (the Cesare Zavattini Prize) and a film festival (the Unarchive Film Festival) entirely dedicated to these kinds of films.5 In recent years, this orientation has contributed to making the archive’s collection the object of several artistic initiatives and scholarly works (most of them in Italian), facilitated also by the geographical proximity between AAMOD and the University Roma Tre (whose department of film and media studies sits literally around the corner and behind the archive’s main building) and by the commitment to the valorisation of AAMOD’s collections by many of its faculty members.6
9This orientation has also pushed the archive, and some of its most prominent members, such as its second president (between 1989 and 2011), Ansano Giannarelli (Medici 2012; Grizzaffi 2023), to engage in an open critical reflection about copyright, to promote “use as knowledge and reuse as creativity […] for a ‘social property of intellectual production’” (Carucci 2011, 10). Throughout the 2000s, AAMOD organised a series of meetings and seminars around the issue of copyright, copyleft, the open source and commons movements in order to debate the position of documentary cinema’s use of audiovisual archival materials in the context of a rapidly changing technological and legal environment (Giannarelli and Cortini 2010). The archive put particular emphasis on the increasingly widespread use of “quotations” of shots or sequences in contemporary films and on the emergence of found footage films as a genre on its own. As written in one of the texts included in AAMOD’s publication on this issue, significantly titled “Documentary filmmakers of the world, unite!”:
“The circulation of ideas, the creation of consensus and the criticism of the founding values of our societies, is entrusted - in an increasingly predominant way - to communication through images. Despite their centrality, however, access to images is increasingly rigid and controlled. The limitations that the independent documentary maker finds himself facing are now such as to compromise the very principle of freedom of information and criticism that is the basis of every democracy.” (Visalberghi 2010, 279)
- 7 “Fair Use” is a legal doctrine that allows limited use of copyrighted material without needing perm (...)
10On this ground, the archive came to play a proactive role in support of the formulation of a new jurisdiction (in Italy and Europe) about “fair use,”7 in order to make it easier (and above all cheaper) for independent documentarists to use archival materials and found footage in their films.
11Beyond the debates about copyright, Ansano Giannarelli played a pivotal role in the development of the archive’s political philosophy. As one of the founding members of the archive, he wrote the archive’s statute and later, as president, was engaged in multiple initiatives to develop and rejuvenate the archive’s structure and activities. The statute offers multiple important inputs to better describe AAMOD’s archiving philosophy. It underlines the “autonomous cultural value” of “all audio-visual products,” indicating a first fundamental principle of the archive, that is, the rejection of “any hierarchy of genres and technologies and, obviously, of subjects” in cataloguing audiovisual sources (Carucci 2011, 9). A second point that clearly emerges from the statute is AAMOD’s intention to focus on the preservation of “audio-visual sources directly produced by the ‘subordinate classes’ and by their political and trade union organizations [the world over], however little sensitive [they might have been] to the need for conservation” (Carucci 2011, 13). Finally, the statute clearly reasserts the value of audiovisual materials as historical documents that can contribute “to the scientific analysis of historical processes, of human life, of the transformation of the environment and of nature” (Giannarelli 2011a, 36), and their importance for both educational and creative purposes: audiovisual materials, in this sense, are seen as “cultural assets to be disseminated and to be socialized on a permanent basis (and all the more in the case of audio-visual documents concerning the workers’ movement), without keeping them closed in museums and archives available almost exclusively to specialists” (Giannarelli 2011a, 37). Following this vision, archives can clearly be seen as political agents in the elaboration of new political futurities, and as productive instruments for the formulation of original approaches to the use of collective memory as a tool for political emancipation.
12AAMOD’s structure and history highlight the relevance of formal political structures (such as the Italian PCI) and more spontaneous activist movements in financing, circulating and preserving audiovisual materials not only for historical reasons but also for political, educational and artistic purposes. For African cinema, these materials are today a particularly useful resource for filmmakers and intellectuals from the continent who struggle to have (free) access to images of the past that, in principle, belong to them and their societies (Losh 2022). Many available resources are stored in archives protected by expensive paywalls, making it often impossible for filmmakers (especially those belonging to the young, upcoming generation) to use archival materials in their work (compare Hediger, Cheeka and Campanini 2021). AAMOD offers an important alternative, grounded on an explicit, political orientation, clearly expressed by its founders in the idea, mentioned earlier, of archival materials as a collective asset, inherently open to new uses and meanings.
- 8 These four collections are discussed in Folens and Lancialonga (2021).
13AAMOD is organised in several separate collections which include but are not limited to the initial materials from the PCI archive. The collections are organised so that the user can retrieve information about each audiovisual or written document’s context of production and its provenance. Already existing scholarly works on AAMOD focus on specific collections, such as the one around which the archive itself was initially created (the audiovisual archive of the PCI, including all Unitelefilms’ productions), on specific authors (such as Antonello Branca and Libero Bizzarri), or on specific production companies (such as REIAC).8 Other publications focus on specific thematic streams that cut across AAMOD’s collections, such as the films about the Algerian liberation war (Peretti and Scarnati 2022), the audio-visual documents about Italian imperialism in Africa (Casula, Spagnoletti and Triulzi 2020) or Italian militant cinema about the Vietnam war (Curi 2015).
- 9 For a full list of the materials related to Africa and African diasporas, check AAMOD’s online cata (...)
14Overall, AAMOD’s collections are vast and layered and it is impossible to provide here a detailed account of all the materials that could be of interest to artists and scholars of African cinema.9 What follows is a brief description of a selection of three thematic streams that are particularly significant because of the rarity of the audiovisual materials included in them, their relatively little exploitation to date, and the potential contribution they offer for future researches on African revolutionary cinema and the production of found footage films. In fact, as mentioned earlier, through a system of grants and scholarships, AAMOD encourages scholars and filmmakers to engage with its archival materials, in order to produce new filmic and scholarly accounts of the history of liberation struggles across the world. This section of the essay thus aims at making information about the archive’s holdings more easily accessible to non-Italian speakers and to African and diasporic filmmakers and researchers that might have an interest in engaging with these resources.
15As mentioned in the introduction, the PCI intensified its collaboration with African liberation movements in the second half of the 1950s and throughout the 1960s. For this reason, the African struggles that appear more prominently in the archive are those which took longer to achieve their goals, because of the particularly violent nature of the liberation struggle (as, for instance, in Algeria, Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea Bissau), or which never managed to become independent (like Réunion Island).
- 10 The collection on this topic is so rich that AAMOD has planned the forthcoming publication of a mon (...)
16In what concerns the liberation struggle in African Lusophone countries, Pinna reminds us that “the path of the Italian solidarity towards MPLA, FRELIMO and PAIGC was built from the opposition to Salazar’s and Caetano’s dictatorship combined with the action of the Portuguese exiled people who had settled in Italy and focused on communication to […] improve awareness of young people in the Sixties and Seventies” (2020, 319). This effort resulted in the production of numerous audiovisual documents, which include films directly produced by Unitelefilm and footage acquired by the PCI archive over time.10 The films directly produced by Unitelefilm include Rinaldo De Nicola’s Il continente nero attende ancora (1973) (see Video 1), with a long section on the Lusophone African liberation movements and interviews with some of its main leaders (PAIGC’s Amilcar Cabral, FRELIMO’s Marcelino dos Santos, and MPLA’s Agostino Neto), and Elena Bedei’s L’organizzazione di una comune agricola (1977), only available on celluloid, which portrays the life in an adela comunale (an “agricultural commune”) under FRELIMO’s administration. Also produced by Unitelefilm are non-edited footage such as Documentazione filmica sulle attività del Frelimo in Mozambico (1970), coproduced with the FRELIMO’s audiovisual department, and available only on celluloid, which focuses on the organisation of the Mozambican liberation army, and audio reports, including interviews with leaders of other liberation fronts across Lusophone Africa, such as Amilcar Cabral, Mário Pinto de Andrade, and other leaders of the liberation movement.
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18Other interesting documents in this collection are not produced directly by Unitelefilm. There are, for instance, José Massip’s Madina Boe (1968, produced by the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematogràficos, only available on celluloid) which focuses on episodes of the Guinean liberation struggle; and Alfredo Melgar’s I movimenti di liberazione Frelimo – MPLA (1970) (see Video 2), which includes lengthy interviews with FRELIMO’s Marcelino dos Santos and reports on the links between FRELIMO and Julius Nyerere’s TANU party in Tanzania. These documents have received little attention to date, but could be useful for furthering scholarship on international interconnections of filmmaking in post-independence Lusophone countries (in relation to Mozambique, see for instance Gray 2020; Schefer 2015).
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20Quite smaller but equally interesting is AAMOD’s collection of audiovisual documents about Réunion Island, which focus on the highly controversial episodes of the elections that took place on the island in 1962 and 1963, opposing the former French prime minister Michel Debré (representing the mostly white population favourable to making the Réunion Island an overseas French department) and Paul Vergès (the founder of the Communist Party of Réunion, who fought for the island’s autonomy from France and from the abrogation of its status as a French overseas department). According to historical evidences (Combeau 2002) and the witnesses shown in the documents, the elections were rigged in favour of Debré, and the results were protected thanks to the deployment of police force coming from the metropole. AAMOD’s collections include two documentaries about this controversial historical episode: Yann Le Masson’s Sucre Amer (1963), produced by Le Grain de Sable, only available on celluloid, and considered to be the first French documentary on an election, which was banned in France for several years after its release; and Jean-Michel Humeau and Robert Destanque’s documentary Réunion (1967), signed by the two filmmakers with the pseudonyms Jo and Freddy Kant (Video 3), which also focuses on the elections, highlighting the liberation struggle of the local communist party. If these two films are relatively well known among scholars of Reunionese politics and culture, as well as among Francophone postcolonial critics, their availability in the archive offers a unique opportunity for filmmakers to mobilise their rich visual texture and political content in projects about independence movements in Francophone Africa.
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22AAMOD’s collection also encompasses several documents about the Eritrean struggle for independence from Ethiopia. It includes, for instance, productions about the EPLF made by Japanese, British, Norwegian and German crews between 1976 and 1982, which document the different phases of the liberation war and everyday life in the areas controlled by the EPLF, as well as a collection donated by the French activist reporter and documentary filmmaker Christian Sabatier (known in Eritrea as Hilal), after he became a member of AAMOD in 1984. After spending several years in Lebanon, where he collaborated with Palestinian refugees and activists, Sabatier joined the Eritrean struggle in the early 1970s and contributed to the creation of the EPLF Photojournalism Department, which he headed for several years. This department had an important role in documenting and publicising the history of the Eritrean struggle for liberation, so as to obtain international support. As Azeb Tewolde underlines in an article about EPLF’s archives, after its First Congress in 1977, EPLF “grew into a formidable organization” (2018, 16), which invested massively in the production of educational and propaganda materials which were attentively stored and archived. “With the introduction of modern types of printing machines [and portable film equipment], the number of produced records and published materials started to increase rapidly. Almost all departments had their own regular periodicals according to their subject areas” (ibid.), and the Photojournalism Department integrated these departments by focusing on audiovisual documentation.
- 11 See “EmbassyMedia - Interview with Christian Sabatier Hilal, ” uploaded on Youtube by Eritrea Embas (...)
23The collection donated by Sabatier includes footage and reports covering the period between 1976 and 1984, assembled by Sabatier himself, and edited films such as Sabatier’s Sawrana (1978), available in celluloid and digital formats, Erythrée ’79 (1979) (Video 4), and Kalsina (1984), only available on celluloid–all produced by the EPLF’s Photojournalism Department and focusing on specific episodes of the liberation struggle as well as on the organisation of the everyday life in liberated zones. For some of these films, Sabatier recalls in an interview that part of the post-production was done in Rome,11 since the EPLF had a headquarter there and maintained strong links with Italian activists and members of the Eritrean diaspora (as shown in the film A testimonianza di una condizione - 2000 eritrei a Roma, which I will briefly analyse in the next section of this article). These materials shed light on a little-studied dimension of the EPLF’s liberation effort, that is, its focus on media and communication as revolutionary tools. Sabatier’s work and experience in this sense is a highly valuable resource to understand how the Eritrean liberation movement cultivated its international image and connected with other international political and artistic movements to gain support in its struggle against Ethiopia.
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25The documents about African liberation struggles and political movements conserved by AAMOD also include a few materials about political activism in the diaspora. There are, for instance, a few documents about racism and discrimination against African Americans in the United States and about forms of political activism against it, such as Antonello Branca’s film on the Black Panthers, Seize the time (1970) (Video 5), as well as several unedited materials collected by Branca during the time he spent in North America. Also connected to this thematic stream, there are several films concerning migration and African workers’ movements in Italy which are of particular interest. They include some of the earliest films made about this topic in Italy, such as Federico Bruno, Giovanni Gervasi, Ali Reza Movahed, Paolo Rossato, and Johannes Yemane’s A testimonianza di una condizione - 2000 eritrei a Roma (1977) (Video 6), Gabriella Morandi, Alessandro Rossetto and Alessandro Zanini’s Nerosubianco (1988) available only in digital format, Adriana Giai and Leticia Vargas’s Vu cumprà non ha senso (1990) (Video 7), and Paolo Di Nicola’s Chi ha paura dell’uomo nero (1995) (Video 8).
26Among these films, of particular interest because of their content and production history are A testimonianza di una condizione - 2000 eritrei a Roma and Vu cumprà non ha senso. The first one, which I will more closely analyse in the next section, is in my knowledge one of the earliest films focusing on an African diasporic community in Italy (in this case the Eritreans in Rome), as well as one of the very first films with an African diasporic filmmaker based in Italy, Johannes Yemane (an Eritrean who trained at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in the 1970s) involved in the film’s production and direction. The second film, Vu cumprà non ha senso, is notable, first of all, because it is produced by the Cuban Escuela Internacional de Cine y Television, created by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Garcia Espinosa and Fernando Birri (head of the school at the time), three former students of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. This confirms the interesting universe of relations connecting the Italian communist party to Third Cinema filmmakers, of which AAMOD is both a result and an historical trace. But the film is also particularly interesting for its content. It is a documentary shot by two students of the Cuban film school who travelled around Italy to document the hot social and political atmosphere surrounding the presence of migrant workers in late 1980s Italy. The film includes several interviews with African activists and members of workers’ unions, as well as an interview with the South African refugee Jerry Masslo—a name sadly well known by whoever works on the history of African migration to Italy (De Cesaris and Impagliazzo 2020; Di Sanzo 2023).
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31The story of Jerry Masslo is symbolic for several reasons. A young South African fleeing the apartheid regime, Masslo was politically active in South Africa against the regime, which murdered his father and daughter. He arrived in Italy in 1988 and requested political asylum, without managing to obtain it. Since no rejection policies existed at the time, he was released without any legal residency status in Italy. In the summer following his arrival, he finally moved to the southern town of Villa Literno to work on the tomato harvest, in a context already widely characterised by the illegal exploitation of seasonal migrant labour, and by strong mafia control of the territory. Despite the grim situation, in the summer of 1989 Masslo went back to work at Villa Literno, but the situation had evolved compared to the previous year, with groups of workers organising protest to demand more dignified housing and working conditions. The situation in the small southern town was becoming increasingly tense, with growing racist sentiments against seasonal migrants and the emergence of local youth patrols attacking the migrant community. Almost at the end of the harvest season, on 24 August 1989, Masslo was killed during a fight that erupted between a group of local young people, who had descended on the migrant workers’ camp to make a racket, disturbing its residents and some migrant workers. In the days following the incident, Masslo’s murder become a topic of national debate, opening a new phase in the history of the public debate about African migration into Italy: it is in fact as a result of this situation, and of the political mobilisation of both migrant workers and Italian political activists that followed the killing of Masslo, that a law about immigration—the Martelli Law—was promulgated by the Italian government (Pompei 2020). Images of the demonstrations that followed Masslo’s death and of his funeral are edited into the documentary, which was mostly shot before this episode.
32If images of organised political activism of migrants are present in several of the mentioned films, AAMOD’s collection also includes footage and materials specifically recorded during African workers’ strikes, such as the footage about the Senegalese workers’ hunger strike that took place in the spring of 1990 in Florence (Video 9). As the next section discusses in more depth, all of these materials are invaluable resources to reconstitute and illustrate the complex history of a phenomenon (the exploitation of migrant workers in Italy and migrant political activism) which is often represented only in its most recent manifestations, as if it was a contemporary emergency rather than a long term, layered reality.
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- 12 See also Jedlowski (2025).
34All the films mentioned in this article, and many others included in AAMOD’s fascinating collections, would be worth exploring in more depth, but in order to respect the scope and limits of this essay, this section focuses only on one example: the documentary film A testimonianza di una condizione - 2000 eritrei a Roma.12 The film was made in 1977 by five students at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia—Federico Bruno, Giovanni Gervasi, Ali Reza Movahed, Paolo Rossato and Johannes Yemane—and it focuses on the Eritrean diaspora resident in Rome, to which Johannes Yemane himself belonged. To my knowledge, this is one of the very first films in which an African migrant community based in Italy is portrayed at length and in depth. The film meets some of its members, notably Eritrean women, in the vicinity of Rome’s central train station; it then follows some of them in their everyday life as domestic workers in Italian households through lengthy interviews and descriptions of their conditions of exploitation; it spends a weekend with them during their leisure time, which is mostly devoted to religious, cultural and political gatherings with other community members, largely coordinated by members of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) resident in Rome; and finally attends some political meetings organised by the EPLF during weekdays to discuss the situation in their home country as well as the connection between the struggle in Eritrea and the fight to obtain better living conditions in Italy.
- 13 Translation: “Here, abroad, in Italy, find ourselves in a very bad, really very bad situation […] F (...)
35There are several aspects of this film that are worth highlighting. The first, maybe a relatively banal but still important point, is the value of a document that shows images of the “black” Rome or “black” Italy almost twenty years before artists and scholars begun to discuss and thematise the visual representation of blackness and migration on Italian screens. It does so through strong images and powerful words which crudely describe the exploitation of immigrant labour. The words from one of the interviewed women that open the documentary are straightforward in this sense: “noi qui all’estero, in Italia, ci troviamo molto male, davvero molto male. […] Bene o male riusciamo a trovare un posto [di lavoro] ma è il posto a cui hanno rinunciato non solo le donne italiane ma tutti gli altri stranieri, in posti proprio orribili, con famiglie proprio pestifere.”13 The particular position of Eritrean, Somali and Ethiopian women in the history of immigration to Italy has only recently begun to be explored in depth (Gissi 2022), even if their presence was clearly underlined already in early demographic and sociological studies about immigration in Italy during the 1970s and 1980s (Di Sanzo 2023). In relation to this emerging field of studies, this film constitutes a valuable and unexplored document that permits a glimpse at these women’s view on their experiences in Italy and their relationship with their homeland.
- 14 It is interesting to draft a parallel between this documentary film and another short film that exp (...)
- 15 It is useful to remember here that women played a particularly important role in the Eritrean liber (...)
36In this sense, it is important to underscore the fundamental place occupied by strong, politically active women in the film. One could almost see the film as a remake of one of African cinema’s best known classics, Ousmane Sembène’s La Noire de… (1966), in which the protagonist does not commit suicide as a result of the exploitation and discrimination she suffers in France, but instead fights back and organises herself politically to defend her rights.14 In A testimonianza di una condizione this is precisely what one of the interviewed Eritrean women describes, discussing how she escaped from the oppressive Italian family where she was working, and found strength in the political activities promoted by the EPLF. No doubt, some of EPLF’s driven propaganda is at play here, but nevertheless, the woman makes a powerful statement about the importance of the experience of the liberation struggle in her own country, as an example that pushed her to fight injustice also in the diaspora.15 This highlights once again the complex interplay between liberation struggles taking place in Africa and across the diaspora, conducted by both African people and non-African activists in solidarity with the African liberation cause, visible in most of the documents of the AAMOD’s collections related to African liberation struggles. In the existing scholarship this interplay has been mostly analysed in relation to the role that communist internationalism and political activism have played in relation to liberation struggles in Africa (compare Gray 2020). However, this film highlights the importance of also looking the other way around at these interactions.That is, by focusing on the way in which political movements in the home country had an impact on the political emancipation of members of the diaspora in the foreign countries in which they lived.
37Finally, another strong point in the film is its capacity to show the existence of an Afrocentric universe in the heart of a European capital. In the central part of the film, which covers a large community gathering during the weekend, the viewer is immersed in a fully Eritrean world, where traditional Eritrean music and dances are being performed, and women are spreading money on the performers in front of an entirely African public, with nearly no white people in the audience. These realities have long existed and still exist today in the heart of most European cities, but often beyond the knowledge and acknowledgement of the larger public and its institutions, who prefer to entertain the fiction of a mostly white, homogenous Italian and European society. The depiction of an African public in a 1970s Italian documentary is a powerful reminder, once again, of the complex and long-term historicity of African presence in Italy, and of the legacies of the imperial conquest.
38In line with its mission of making images like these available and relevant to contemporary scholarly and artistic interventions, AAMOD has recently created a new, open collection on “Migrant videos.”16 In ways similar to other initiatives that emerged in Italy over the past decade, such as the “Archivio delle memorie migranti” (“Archive of migrant memories”—see Frisina and Muresu 2018; Tiulzi 2020), AAMOD’s migrant videos collection put together videos made by migrants themselves on the migration route across the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea; their stay in Libyan camps and their experience of the Italian asylum system; and videos by NGOs which show what happens to migrants in the Mediterranean Sea as a result of the enforcement of the increasingly restrictive European and Italian laws on migration. This is done with the threefold objective of physically keeping the audiovisual materials safe from material decay, countering possible theft and (politically-motivated) manipulation, and, most importantly, constituting a database of archival materials that can help future generations better understand the experience of African migrants coming to Europe in the late 20th and early 21st century. Together with other materials on African experiences in Italy that AAMOD preserves, this collection ultimately aims at providing the materials for opening up Italian collective memory and identity so as to make it more plural, multiple and diverse, like the population that has long inhabited the Peninsula.
39As Zavattini put it in the quote mentioned earlier, AAMOD’s documents “are not there on the shelves in an indeterminate wait,” to be discovered and used only by scholars and experts (Zavattini quoted in Carucci 2011, 13). They are there “to enter today’s dialectic of democratic struggles, to help create freer information from its roots” (ibid.), to guide us to imagine alternative futures, on the ground of the way other futures have been, indeed, imagined in the past. The activities that AAMOD developed over the past few years, including the found footage film festival “Unarchive,” the Zavattini film prize and the scholarship programme for artists and scholars willing to engage with the materials kept in the archive, as well as the new collection on migrant videos, are all instances of how Zavattini’s suggestion has informed the work of AAMOD over the past decades.
40As shown with the examples highlighted in the second part of the essay, the archive is vast, and much work still need to be done to transform AAMOD’s collections about African liberation movements and African diasporic activism into what African American scholar Shelleen Greene (2021) calls an archive of “black futurity,” that is, an archive that helps envisioning new futures that take into account the historical depth and significance of black and African experience for understanding our present world. As the curators of the Black Archive Alliance project, organised by the Villa Romana and Black History Month Florence, underline in the project’s presentation, there are many histories like those carried by the materials kept in AAMOD “that have not even grazed the notes in the margins of history books whose relevance within contemporary society are yet to be determined” (quoted in Green 2021, 33). It is for this reason that part of this essay focused, in a rather descriptive way, on mapping some of the resources concealed in AAMOD’s premises, to encourage further artistic and scholarly engagement with them.
41However, beyond suggesting possible opportunities to transform these archival materials into black futurities, AAMOD’s specific history and structure, and the materials kept in the archive help open up the concept of “African revolutionary film” to include in its definition the multiple, complex experiences of political solidarity and collaboration that led to the African liberation struggle. This means taking into account the creative contribution of non-African artists, filmmakers and intellectuals who, acting often in the name of communist and socialist internationalism, devoted themselves to the anticolonial cause in their home countries and across the African continent, creating alternative networks of cultural production and dissemination. In this sense, in line with what Ros Gray (2020) has written in relation to Mozambique, the politics of internationalism that ground much of the audiovisual works kept in AAMOD allow us to go beyond “categories that organise contemporary film studies such as ‘national cinemas’ and ‘world cinemas,’ which have become naturalised but in fact emerged in particular conditions of the restoration of capitalism through the neoliberal order” (Gray 2020, Location no. 361). In a similar way, works about African migrant activism in Italy offer the opportunity to unpack monolithic accounts about Italian identity and politics, to highlight the important role that migration, and African diasporic activism played in shaping Italian society and culture.
Video 1. Il continente nero attende ancora
Directed by Rinaldo De Nicola. 1973. 53 min., 44 sec.
Produced by Ufficio Cinema PCI.
Language: Italian.
Available on AAMOD’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMKr5i4HJZU.
Detailed Description: http://patrimonio.aamod.it/aamod-web/film/detail/IL8600001343/22/il-continente-nero-attende-ancora.html
Video 2. I movimenti di liberazione Frelimo – MPLA
Directed by Alfredo Melgar. 1970. 29 min., 53 sec.
Produced by Ufficio Cinema PCI.
Language: Italian.
Available on AAMOD’s Vimeo channel: https://vimeo.com/827649446?share=copy.
Detailed Description: http://patrimonio.aamod.it/aamod-web/film/detail/IL8600001219/22/documenti-sui-movimenti-liberazione-frelimo-mpla.html
Video 3. Réunion ’67
Directed by Jo and Freddy Kant (pseudonyms of Michel Humeau and Robert Destanque). 1973. 22 min., 11 sec.
Language: French.
Available on AAMOD’s Vimeo channel https://vimeo.com/832187178.
Detailed Description: http://patrimonio.aamod.it/aamod-web/film/detail/IL8600001292/22/reunion-67.html
Video 4. Erytrhrée ‘79 - La repli stratégique [sic]
Director unknown. 1979. 18 min., 38 sec.
Produced by Département Cinématographique du Front Populaire pour la Libération de l’Erythrée.
Original title : Erythrée ‘79 - Le repli stratégique
Language: French.
Available on AAMOD’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWHKd7yOh84
Detailed description: http://patrimonio.aamod.it/aamod-web/film/detail/IL8500001907/22/erytrhree-79.html
Video 5. Seize the Time
Directed by Antonello Branca. 1970. 1 hour, 30 min., 11 sec.
Produced by Filmakers Research Group Roma
Language: English.
Available on AAMOD’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSZrCsX3D7Y
Detailed description: http://patrimonio.aamod.it/aamod-web/film/detail/IL8000001416/22/seize-the-time-1.html
Video 6. A testimonianza di una condizione - 2000 eritrei a Roma
Directed by Federico Bruno, Giovanni Gervasi, Ali Reza Movahed, Paolo Rossato, and Johannes Yemane. 1977. 21 min., 2 sec.
Produced by Il Centro sperimentale di Cinematografia.
Language: Italian.
Available on AAMOD’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAdJLYbg1Ug
Detailed description: http://patrimonio.aamod.it/aamod-web/film/detail/IL8700001916/22/a-testimonianza-condizione.html
Video 7. Vu cumprà non ha senso
Directed by Adriana Giai and Leticia Vargas. 1990. 35 min., 5 sec.
Produced by Escuela Internacional de Cine y Television de San Antonio de Los Baños and Comune di San Giuliano Terme (Pisa).
Language : Italian.
Available on AAMOD’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov7owKdPnJs
Detailed description: http://patrimonio.aamod.it/aamod-web/film/detail/IL8020003788/22/vu-cumpra-non-ha-senso.html
Video 8. Chi ha paura dell uomo nero?
Directed by Paolo Di Nicola. 1995. 13 min. 55 sec.
Produced by Archivio audiovisivo del movimento operaio e democratico.
Language: Italian.
Available on AAMOD’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3aHpzyyVfU
Detailed description: http://patrimonio.aamod.it/aamod-web/film/detail/IL8700004303/22/chi-ha-paura-uomo-nero.html
Video 9. “Sciopero della fame degli immigrati senegalesi. Firenze, 13 maggio 1990”
Director unknown. 1990. 32 min., 10 sec.
Film footage, unfinished.
Language: Italian.
Available on AAMOD’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvXi_-AzBvA
Detailed description: http://patrimonio.aamod.it/aamod-web/film/detail/IL8000003311/22/sciopero-della-fame-degli-immigrati-senegalesi-firenze-13-maggio-1990.html
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