1Freedom for Ghana (1957), a thirty-five-minute film of Ghana’s independence celebrations, documents the triumphant outcome of Ghana’s revolution. The film was made by the Ghana Film Unit which, unlike its colonial predecessor the Gold Coast Film Unit, served a newly liberated Ghanaian government. And yet, Freedom for Ghana is exemplary of the ambiguities in revolutionary African cinemas and their unresolved afterlives that the essays in this special issue explore. For while Freedom for Ghana depicts the defining moment of Ghana’s revolution against colonial rule, upon independence the Ghana Film Unit was still run by foreign nationals in prominent leadership positions. In the Ghana Film Unit’s 1958 catalogue, Freedom for Ghana is described as having “attempted more than the conventional record of a happy Royal tour on an auspicious occasion. The film shows all the splendour and ceremonial, the gaiety, political ferment and exuberance which swept through Ghana on 6^th March, 1957.” Here the catalogue explicitly draws a distinction between Ghana’s independence celebrations and the Unit’s previous documentation of British royalty (Salute to a Queen, Gold Coast Film Unit, 1953). Drawing a direct comparison between the “conventional” film records of the Gold Coast Film Unit and those of the new Ghana Film Unit was necessary to project a revolutionary break from colonialism, both within Ghana and the Unit itself, and begin the work of imagining Ghana’s liberated future.

2Above are the first few frames of a deteriorating 16 mm print of Freedom for Ghana that was photographed in the Central Film Library of Ghana’s Information Services Department (ISD) in 2011. The print’s faded red color is a sign of its decomposition and neglect. Extremely fragile and warped, the film was not projectable. Since then, the print has been thrown away and its last remaining film copies are housed in hard-to-access archives in the global north, a fate that is common to many African research materials, and a telling example of the constraining circumstances of colonial and postcolonial “ruination” (Stoler 2013). These dire material conditions of decay, erasure and neglect cruelly contrast with the aspirations and hopes for revolutionary change that African cinema conveyed in the aftermath of independence.

3A close inspection of the image of the decomposing print of Freedom for Ghana shows that the black star of Ghana’s national flag is still discernable. Within the artistic reclamation movement that has emerged across Africa, this faded black star becomes a specter of inspiration from an earlier global Black liberation struggle. Once a major symbol of Pan-African unity and aspirations, in its decay it signals the continuous postponing of, and ongoing hope for a liberation that is yet to come. The deterioration and displacement of Freedom for Ghana has become a source for creative reimagination among young Ghanaians that the editors of this special issue are directly involved in. The screenshot/excerpt below is taken from The Storytellers, a film still in production, directed by Anita Afonu and produced by Dan Hodgkinson, that follows Afonu as she reworks the cinematic conventions, methods, and idealism of this lost era of filmmaking to produce a film about freedom today.

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5The figure of Bolshevik filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein looms over discussions of revolution and cinema. As a historical materialist, Eisenstein saw change as dialectical: through revolutionary contest, the past was incorporated into the production of the new. This belief had personal resonance. By breaking the apparently “natural” processes of social change, the 1917 revolution smashed the multiple temporalities of Eisenstein’s life that connected the past, present and future, giving him “the opportunity to produce himself anew” (Wollen 2013, 13). As a filmmaker, he saw revolutionary cinema as doing something similar for audiences. Through particular cinematic techniques (most famously montage), he believed that films could “take control of the viewer’s perceptive [faculties]… until that viewer begins to act in consonance with the logic of objective reality” (Polan 1977, 18). As such, he could reveal to audiences the “real” conditions of society that were hidden by the “naturalness” of class hierarchy.

6A remarkable number of African filmmakers in the independence era similarly aspired to make films that would break Africans’ temporal frames and radically reshape their understanding and engagement with the world. In this special issue, however, rather than subscribe to a narrow etic conception, we argue for understanding what counts as “liberation” and “revolution” as context-specific, emic categories within broader discourses of transformation. In response to the ruin and exile that these revolutionary films have faced from postcolonial authoritarianism and structural adjustment policies, this special issue furthers the urgent work of scholars and archivists to address issues of restitution, reparation and the digitization of Africa’s film archives which contain important sources for contemporary artists, activists, and filmmakers attempting to radically reimagine futures that escape the postcolonial feeling of a dead-end present.

7This special issue—and the “Visions of Life: Utopian Dreams, African Revolutionary Filmmaking, and the Film Archive” conference held at the University of Oxford in 2022, which inspired it—revisits African filmmaking during expanded periods of political decolonization to critically examine, yet not without hope, the complexities of revolutionary filmmaking on the continent. We contend that the scholarship on this era’s filmmaking has largely foreclosed important investigations into Africa’s expansive cinematic history because debates tended to be structured around a select canon of largely West African francophone film auteurs who were committed to a particular agenda of revolutionary filmmaking. Participation in revolutionary discourses was the dominant process through which people imagined historical change and has, both then and now, inspired wildly different projects of filmic and aesthetic creation. As such, articles in this issue cover a variety of regions across anglophone, francophone, and lusophone Africa. They investigate understudied filmmaking genres and political contexts, such as: queer underground amateur cinemas in Apartheid South Africa (Wagner); Italian communist solidarity films about armed liberation struggles in Eritrea and lusophone Africa and African migrants to Italy in the 1970–90s (Jedlowski); Idi Amin’s Ugandan propaganda films (Peterson and Vokes); colonial ethnographic films of Ethiopia (Thubeauville and Karim); issues of African film restitution in independent found footage filmmaking (Perneczky); and a documentary about Guinea’s independence during postcolonial rule (Pauthier, Goerg, and Chomentowski). The issue also includes two interviews: one with Annouchka de Andrade, daughter of filmmaker Sarah Maldoror, and one with the president of the Ghana Academy of Film and Television Arts (GAFTA), Jim Panbonor Awindor.

8With many of the films discussed in this issue, filmmaking was a phenomenal source for audiences and filmmakers to make sense of the rapid change brought by decolonization. Visual narratives created and popularized postcolonial and subversive subjectivities that orientated people in a moment of flux. As Ciraj Rassool writes, people “live out their affairs in storied forms” (Rassool 2004, 43) and film was an important storytelling medium of the time. Many of the films discussed in this issue provided and provide a popular means for radical critique of and distancing from colonization, imperialism, heteronormativity, and postcolonial authoritarianism, either directly or through the re-editing of colonial films.

9These films have sought the political, cultural, and aesthetic emancipation of African people beyond Western norms and narratives. As Jim Fara Awindor states in this special issue, “we needed to use that same instrument [filmmaking] to redeem ourselves” (Afonu and Awindor 2025). As several articles show, the apparent power of film was evident in how state leaders invested significant time and resources into national film industries, often explicitly to bring the nation’s political future under their control in the name of “liberation.” Whether or not such films were effective at realizing the ambitions of their creators or political backers, they were certainly perceived as dangerous by successive waves of politicians who feared that their power over audiences could be reworked and reactivated long after their initial release. It was, in part, because of the belief of their potential to transform, that many of these “revolutionary” visions were destroyed or hidden, as was the case with Freedom for Ghana after Ghana’s 1966 coup d’état (Blaylock 2024). Under Ignatius Kutu Acheampong’s dictatorship, Freedom for Ghana was conspicuously absent from the Central Film Library’s rental catalogue, making it unavailable for rent.

10Considering contemporary African activists, scholars, and artists’ attempts to recover and reclaim the political and imaginative possibilities of their nation’s pasts from the destruction caused by postcolonial authoritarianism and Western-imposed structural adjustment, we turn in this issue to an expansive notion of African revolutionary film that is not yoked to a particular periodization or politics. As the celluloid base of film is never stable (it is always decomposing), we contend that a film’s revolutionary politics are also never static. To speak of “revolution” is also to describe an instance of revolving, a turn around a central axis like that of a spinning top or a projected film reel. Revolutionary politics, which seek liberation, need sources of oppression to turn away from and resist as in the catalogue description of Freedom for Ghana. This conception of revolution is helpful for revealing the tension between propaganda and revolutionary filmmaking, and the contested uses of political films after they are released, as the essays in this issue highlight. Film, in the context of revolutionary politics, becomes an unstable record, contextually malleable for a variety of liberatory possibilities. We argue that collectively, the diverse interdisciplinary analyses in this issue demonstrate that African revolutionary filmmaking practices pull from the past to try to break from the constraints of the present and move towards the possibility of liberated futures. Several of the authors in this issue explicitly discuss access to archival films as sources for contemporary African social or political transformations (Perneczky, Thubeauville and Karim, Jedlowski). This aspirational will to transform is the core characteristic of revolutionary film that the essays in this issue examine. What makes a film “revolutionary,” then, depends on its contextual (re)utilization and the projections of reel revolutions over time.

Revolution beyond Africa’s auteur canon

11Over the last two decades, historical debate about African independence movements has overturned a prevailing view that had “made it seem as if the territorial nation-state [was] both ‘modern’ and inevitable” to expose a complex landscape of radical projects and possibilities (Cooper 2008, 168). These were revolutionary times with revolutionary visions. From the French war in Algeria (1954–1962) to the Tricontinental in Havana (1966), African and Third World political elites forged new ideals of common purpose and institutions for collective action. To state leaders and intellectuals like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah or Egypt’s Gamel Abdel Nasser, this moment was a rare opportunity to remake social and international order and inspire people’s imaginations with visions of a transformed future (Getachew 2019). Film was embraced as a means of visualizing and popularizing new political ideals in many state-led projects (though not all, as Julius Nyerere’s disinterest illustrates), and both film production and distribution saw an unparalleled level of infrastructure investment. In Ghana, Nkrumah established what one contemporary director referred to as “the best cinematographic infrastructure in tropical Africa” and in 1965 the Egyptian state was building on average a new cinema every week (Diawara 1992, 6). But the radical disruptions of this era produced a countermovement among international states, corporations, and established domestic elites that meant that by the late 1970s, “those sites of radical convergence…were obliterated,” including many centers of cinematic creativity (Allman 2018, 728–32).

12The ambition and creativity of the independence era extended beyond the purview of political elites. African activists—trade unionists, students, artists, writers, and militant filmmakers—had expansive political horizons and often “lived the future orientated sensibility of time” and had “diverse cosmopolitan dispositions [that] allowed [them] to shape, contest, and redefine the meaning of decolonization” (Monaville 2022, 3–4). This vibrant reimagining was expressed in the bodily experimentation of youth cultures in 1960s Mali, where men wore “open shirts, torsos offered all to see,” and in the student activists in Kinshasa, where in 1968 they chanted pro-Vietcong slogans at visiting US vice-President Hubert Humphrey and accused the United States of practicing the same neocolonialism that had led to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba eight years earlier (Rillon 2018; Monaville 2022; Hodgkinson and Melchiorre 2022). Liberatory energies also powered new, intense cinematic creativity across the continent from the rise of neorealist filmmaking in Egypt epitomized by the work of Youssef Chahine, to the birth of Francophone auteur cinema led by such celebrated figures as Souleymane Cissé, Safi Faye, Med Hondo, Djibril Diop Mambéty, and Ousmane Sembène (Niang 2014). New transnational and intimate cinema circulations were created, from feted screenings at Tashkent Film Festival to the secretive private viewings among South Africa’s queer underground.

13With the slight exception of Lusophone militant filmmaking (Gray 2020), African film scholarship on the post-independence period has focused on a group of filmmakers who created the internationalist movement known as the Fédération panafricaine des cinéastes (FEPACI) in 1969, and who were incorporated into the broad project of “Third Cinema” (Eshun and Gray 2011). In Oliver Barlet’s words, its “goal was to create a new aesthetics: semi-documentaries denouncing colonialism where it still existed, and fictions to combat the economic and cultural alienation of the independent countries in respect of the west” (Barlet 2000, 27). While not all African governments took to celebrating African traditions, Sada Niang argues that the aesthetic framework of African auteur filmmakers did emphasize “traditional costumes, dialogues, riddles, and proverbs in local African languages, rural spaces of various kinds, agrarian songs, dances and spaces… so as to elucidate the true creativity of the people and thereby articulate an anti-colonial stance” (Niang 2000, 27). For FEPACI filmmakers in these years, “‘art for art’s sake’ was proscribed,” as many of these filmmakers were opposed to what the celebrated director and scholar, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, acidly described as films that were “terribly seductive in form, but devoid of any cultural substance because they are stupidly commercial” (Vieyra 1969, 128). The revolutionary commitment of these filmmakers focused just as much on “the viruses of [Africa’s] own emerging ‘bourgeoisie’” as on cultural decolonization (Cheriaa 2020, 18). This new tradition of filmmaking as political praxis led the film scholar Nyachukwu Frank Ukadike in 1994 to conclude that “for many African filmmakers, cinema is a revolution” (Ukadike 1994, 5).

14The filmmakers associated with FEPACI saw themselves as radicals whose films posed a revolutionary challenge to their audiences’ views of the world. Speaking in 1974, Ousmane Sembène stated that the “assignment” that African filmmakers faced was to implant “in the minds of others the clear conviction that revolution is necessary and feasible” (Cheriaa 2020, 15). Early FEPACI filmmakers, exemplified by Ousmane Sembène (who was also a novelist), both performed and were read internationally according to auteur models of film criticism arising out of France. French film critics began to reject a “tradition of quality” in favor of films written and directed by the same person in the mid-twentieth century (Truffaut 1954). Alexandre Astruc advanced the idea that cinema, regardless of the many creative inputs from editors, cinematographers, costume and set designers, actors, etc., could be authored (like a novel) with the camera operating as a caméra-stylo (or camera-pen) (Astruc 1948). Sarah Maldoror, the director of the revolutionary film Sambizanga (1972), was both part of the FEPACI filmmakers’ network and peripheral because of her gender. She is represented in this issue through an interview with her daughter, Annouchka de Andrade, entitled, “Prêt pour la révolution?” Within the auteur model, francophone African films have typically been considered forms of “authentic” African cultural repair, as illustrated by Melissa Thackway who stated that they were “artists and intellectuals struggle[ing] to repair the damage done by the colonial regime and its efforts to impose a completely alien culture” (Thackway 2003, 3).

15However, framing African revolutionary cinemas as “authentic” cultural repair limits deeper understandings of the provenance of specific aesthetics, techniques, influences, and how globally engaged and cosmopolitan these filmmakers were. African filmmakers, who grew up as part of late-colonial cinema audiences, were often thrilled by foreign films. “One can hardly find among this group any individual who has not spent a better part of his youth in total awe with gangster, Western or even Bollywood movies,” writes Niang. Yet, only Djibril Diop Mambéty “openly acknowledged such an influence” (Niang 2014, xviii). Additionally, as many of our contributors in this special issue show, many African filmmakers learned techniques of cinematic production in film schools across the world, such as at the VGIK in Moscow, the Łódź Film School in Poland, the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, and at the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry in Havana, taking full advantage of new circulations opened by the Cold War and revolutionary internationalism (Chomentowski 2019, 189–98; Perneczky 2025).

16One node in these internationalist cinematic networks were the militant figures of the Italian neorealists, among whom Cesare Zavattini was “one of the movement’s most important theorists and the screenwriter [for]… De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1948),” as Alessandro Jedlowski shows in this issue. Zavattini played a pivotal “role in connecting neorealism with anticolonial and anti-imperialist cinematographic movements in different regions of the world” and adopted a filmmaking praxis 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)” (Jedlowski 2025). In the collections created at the Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico (AAMOD), which Zavattini founded and led, are the works of militant filmmakers associated with the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), and Lusophone liberation movements, the MPLA, FRELIMO, and the PAIGC. Such revolutionary exchanges were an urgent political “rebellion against contemporary regimes’ monopoly of information” (ibid.).

17The “authenticity” of the films made by FEPACI African filmmakers and those in the internationally recognized neorealist style (like Sambizanga) fit within the structures of the European art film festival circuit and scholarship that sought to elevate film “auteurs” from regions across the world. This influenced global understandings of African cinema at the moment of political decolonization, as the film festival circuit was a critical access point for international spectatorship. Scholarly debate therefore coalesced around a limited number of exemplar filmmakers and their hard to access works, de facto establishing an African film canon. This is best epitomized by Lizelle Bisschoff and David Murphy’s Africa’s Lost Classics, which offers deep investigations of specific films that have reached critical acclaim despite being “lost” to many audiences (Bisschoff and Murphy 2014). Celebrating the African auteur canon has raised the visibility of African film in world cinema spectatorship and scholarship, and it has been central to the continued interest in African film, driven in part by the committed archival work of the June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive, and large restoration projects such as those of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project.

18But the construction of the auteur canon has foreclosed study into the vast non-theatrical filmmaking of the era and its profoundly important state-sponsored, non-fiction, amateur, and activist films, that were excluded or had less visibility in the international film festival circuit. Also hidden by the focus on revolutionary filmmakers-as-auteurs are studies into the many figures (politicians, funders, producers, sound engineers, editors, and others) and institutions involved in the production process, and the political, economic, ideological, and social contexts in which African films were produced, distributed, and received. As Stephanie Schulte Strathaus and Vinzenz Hediger put it, “cinema is more than a succession of great works” (Schulte Strathaus and Hediger 2023, 16). The collection of essays in this issue expands the historiographical lens to include the independence era’s diverse cinematic genres and modes, from state-run newsreels to commercial feature films, from foreign militant solidarity pictures to private home movies. Like those films by African auteurs, the films discussed in these essays are often extremely hard to access. As such, many of these less-canonical filmmaking practices have often gone unexplored and are rarely remarked upon, particularly those with explicit ties to liberation movements or transformational state projects, with some notable exceptions (Gray 2020).

19However, this issue does more than simply reveal the much larger scale of filmmaking and spectatorship in the independence era. It calls for a new approach to studying African cinema that considers films—rather than simply works by visionary artists—as sources for understanding postcolonial politics, how and why these political discourses were constructed, and the power that they were imaged to exercise over their audiences. As Nikolaus Perneczky argues in this issue, for postcolonial filmmakers who produced cinematic works with archival footage,

… the stakes of found footage filmmaking in the context of post-independence nation-building and cultural reconstruction cannot be fully understood through textual and formal analysis alone but must be grounded in the concrete archival encounters and materialities from which these works emerged.
(Perneczky 2025)

20This approach foregrounds a focus on what Sada Niang refers to as film’s “extra-textual situation” (Niang 2014, vii). In his article, Perneczky shows the power of such an approach through his analysis of Liudi tantsa: monolog maski (Les hommes de la danse / Men of Dance, 1965) by Guinean filmmaker Costa Diagne, Afrika, dzhungli, baraban i revolutsiia (Africa, the Jungle, Drums and Revolution, 1977) by Sudanese filmmaker Suliman Elnour, and Mémoire 14 (Memory 14, 1969–1971) by Moroccan writer and filmmaker Ahmed Bouanani. Each filmmaker sought to restitute colonial archival footage and images for use in new cinematic products that, Perneczky argues, could “de-traumatise popular memory and reconstitute historical possibility,” but Perneczky shows how their restitutive and reparative aspirations were incompatible with the postcolonial politics in which these filmmakers’ lives were embedded. Diagne, for instance, came under suspicion by the Toure regime after 1970 and he and his colleagues were imprisoned for seven years in the infamous Camp Boiro which left him “physically handicapped, almost blind, with crushed hands because of torture, with a totally changed perception of revolutionary ideas” (Khalitova 2019, 167, quoted by Perneczky 2025). Bouanani, facing a hostile Moroccan state, actively incorporated censorship into his film by including freeze frames where censors cut out prohibited scenes.

21Centering on historical inquiry veritably shifts canonical narratives about who filmmakers are and why they are politically or culturally significant. Annouchka de Andrade has lamented that Maldoror’s canonical revolutionary film Sambizanga (1972), about the Angolan war of liberation, has eclipsed Maldoror’s other artistic and activist activities. As part of this special issue, Andrade discusses how her mother was also a poet and a fighter and a utopian who defended the cause of the oppressed and the forgotten. She taught her daughters, “Sois comme Mao Tse Tung, il faut se suffire à soi-même” (“Be like Mao Zedong, you must be self-sufficient”) (Andrade et al. 2025). Indeed, Andrade reveals how significant Sambizanga was to the MPLA, as it gave the movement international recognition at a time when support for Angola’s two other liberation movements (UNITA and FLNA) was also strong: “the MPLA needed to be part of a more popular movement and Sambizanga made it possible.” Yet Andrade downplays Maldoror’s commitment to the MPLA, stating that she had an ambivalence towards the political effects of the film, “Sambizanga was the glorification of the role of the MPLA and so for the leadership of the Movement the goal was achieved and is still achieved today. But Sarah was only interested in her desire to move forward” (ibid.). Andrade’s account of her mother’s life and works re-tool the revolutionary currents within Maldoror’s films for a new generation.

22Through our notion of revolutionary film as a device for temporal restructuring, films become sources for understanding transitional times and radical aspirations across historical periods. The studies in this issue examine the context-specific utilization(s) of specific films and reveal how films can produce their “revolutionary” rhetoric anew over time.

Revolutions against and within the dominant order

23Alongside the FEPACI auteurs were many other figures and institutions involved in African filmmaking. Many activist and private films, important newsreels, entertainment features, and educational and instructional films by ambitious state-led cinematic productions have typically been overlooked in scholarship. Part of the reason for this omission was the prevailing view that post-colonial state-led film productions were simple “propaganda” or merely a resolution “to cling to the tradition of British documentary filmmaking… [which] could not satisfy the appetite of citizens” (Ukadike 1994, 109). Indeed, similar exclusions had been made of colonial film history. However, over the last two decades scholars have begun examining African leisure time, fantasy, and entertainment during colonial rule, as well as “ideas about the utility of cinema for engineering consent” and “beliefs about the necessity and efficacy of ‘fictions’ to sustain colonial rule” (Grieveson 2011, 4; see also Georg 2020; Grieveson and MacCabe 2011; Rice 2019; Groo 2013). These investigations into colonial cinema continue to generate important research, such as Jacqueline Maingard, Samantha Iwowo, and Emma Sandon’s new project, Colonial Reels: Histories and Afterlives of Colonial Film Collections (Maingard et al. 2025). Many of these scholars have highlighted the continuities of colonial film practices after independence, such as with the Gold Coast Film Unit’s (GCFU) production of Kofi the Good Farmer (1953), an instructional film designed to promote efficient cocoa farming methods that was widely shown after independence, revealing the “entangled relationship between colonialism and nationalism in postcolonial governance” (Blaylock 2020, 71–86). Indeed, the process of overhauling the racist assumptions and practices of colonial filmmaking and promoting local idioms, visual languages, and storytelling often began prior to independence, as occurred at the GCFU in the 1950s under the leadership of Sean Graham who had been a student of John Grierson and in Jean Rouch’s controversial cinematic collaborations with African participants (Skinner 2009, 121–154; For Rouch’s debated legacy see Stoller 1992; and Ukadike 1994).

24Independence era political leaders, as with colonial filmmakers, considered mass media as an unrivalled political tool for constructing and popularizing official rhetoric and deepening people’s affective ties to state-produced political ideals. While independence-era state filmmaking projects were influenced by earlier colonial aesthetics, and certainly in Anglophone countries used the infrastructure inherited from colonial film units, they were far from the simple examples of postcolonial mimicry that scholars like Manthia Diawara have claimed (Diawara 1992). To understand their radicalism, however, requires engaging in the extra-textual and examining why and how they serviced new post-independence projects of nation building. For instance, films such as Operation Congo (1960), a Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC) newsreel made about Ghana’s military deployment in the “Congo Crisis,” were aesthetically consistent with 1950s Gold Coast colonial documentaries. Yet the Operation Congo was revolutionary in its narrative of Africa driving geo-political events rather than being a victim of them, and in its promotion of new subjectivities, specifically Nkrumah’s “African Personality,” embodied in the film’s depiction of Ghanaian soldiers supporting their “brother” nation (Hodgkinson 2023).

25African state-sponsored films, like Operation Congo, could be dismissed as mere propaganda. While this critique may be reductive, it nevertheless raises several questions taken up in this issue: is the activist always also a propagandist? Are films propaganda from their inception or are they made so by the context in which they are shown? Céline Pauthier, Odile Goerg, and Gabrielle Chomentowski address these questions in their study of Et vint la liberté (1968), a feature film directed by the Guinean director Sékoumar Barry which celebrates the tenth anniversary of Guinea’s independence. As the authors describe in this issue, the film “retraces the history of resistance to colonial conquest in Guinea to establish continuity with the anti-colonial struggle of the 1950s and exalt the heroism of the [Guinean] leader Sékou Touré” (Pauthier et al. 2025). Set to a soundtrack of traditional songs played by the celebrated national ballet, the film exemplified and brought together many strands of the Touré state’s “Cultural Revolution,” which was proclaimed in August 1968. In some ways, Et vint la liberté is paradigmatic of the regime’s state propaganda. It was subject to direct political editing by Sékou Touré and his cabinet and in the repressive years that followed its release, the film was successively re-edited—even after both filmmakers were arrested in 1971—to remove figures who had fallen out of favor with the regime, in a chilling echo of totalitarian practices in the 1930s Soviet Union. But as Pauthier, Goerg, and Chomentowski argue, “If Et vint la liberté ultimately becomes a work of propaganda, its genesis and creative process were more complex” (ibid.). Barry was a conscientious filmmaker who trained at the Belgrade Film School and who worked alongside Mamadou Barry, a classmate, who wrote the screenplay for the film. The authors argue that the film is in the first instance the product of “two friends who are passionate about cinema and want to put themselves at the service of their country to keep the momentum of independence alive” (ibid.).

26It is challenging to answer definitively whether Et vint la liberté is a revolutionary film or mere propaganda based on an analysis of the film alone. Because revolutionary narratives are inevitably romantic in form and involve “distinctive ways of conceiving political change” and temporally ordering it, as literary scholar David Scott has argued, they effectively move audiences into action (Scott 2004, 1). Built around a moment of temporal rupture, revolutionary emplotments invoke a requirement to sacrifice for the cause that were central to anticolonial agitation and, Scott argues, part of the reason that “anticolonial utopias have gradually withered into postcolonial nightmares.” (ibid.). Et vint la liberté was simultaneously a vital space for “alternative modes of action and reflection” that enabled both the construction of substantive political ideals, as well as a structure that permitted severe brutality, as Barry himself experienced, and enabled political elites to build predatory forms of necropolitics to retain their control over state power and wealth (see also Goerg 2021, 129–54). Throughout Barry’s incarceration, his film was celebrated and widely screened in Guinea and promoted amongst solidarity groups at international film festivals, including at the Ouagadougou Film Festival (precursor to FESPACO). The film is an example of the subtle turn between an aesthetics of revolution and that of propaganda, and it is only through studying its extra-textuality over the life of the film’s utilization—its production, distribution, and reception histories—that its political significance can be understood.

27Perhaps nowhere is the cynical exploitation of such revolutionary narrations more evident than in the state-filmmaking promoted by Uganda’s infamous leader, Idi Amin, as Derek Peterson and Richard Vokes show in this issue (2025). Using film footage from the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation’s digitization project, they show how Amin, who came to power in a coup d’État in 1971, sought to legitimize his rule through elaborate, performative campaigns of anti-imperialism. “It was his misfortune,” they argue, “to govern a place that was far from the theatre of anti-imperial struggle” (Peterson and Vokes 2025). As such, “Amin’s regime sought to create its own liberation wars,” most infamously through the expulsion of Ugandan Asians, but also against many other minorities, including Acholi and Langi citizens, Pentecostal and evangelical Christians, independent women, smugglers and other economic nonconformists—all of whom were dubbed foreign oppressors (ibid.). As Peterson and Vokes show, it “was the task of filmmakers, photographers and other image-makers to make inhumanity look heroic, demagoguery appear visionary, and political violence seem to be purposeful” (ibid.).

28African revolutionary film was also used for profoundly different projects than those of anticolonial struggle or postcolonial rule, but which were nevertheless substantive attempts in the survival and nourishment of persecuted communities. This was the case with the amateur filmmaker Ernest Thorp who, as Ludwig Wagner argues in this issue, was a member of Durban’s “revolutionary queer underground film movement” and who privately produced South Africa’s first queer film, Nil Desperandum, between 1949–51 (Wagner 2025). Centering on the character of Mipsie, an older white man “who has a penchant for wearing women’s underwear,” the film at first blush appears as a burlesque celebration of Durban’s clandestine queer countercultures (ibid.). However, the film also carries a “rare political statement” as suggestive scenes of disheveled sailors emerging from a bush are followed by violent homophobic attacks, as Mipsie and his companion are then beaten and robbed by the sailors (ibid.). In contrast to the mass audiences that militant filmmakers hoped to reach in 1950s Apartheid South Africa, where homosexuality was both socially condemned and a criminal offense, queer films like Nil Desperandum were secretly produced, “copied and passed around within a close-knit network of family and friends” (ibid.). In this sense, canonical auteur films, state-sponsored newsreels, transnational activist cinema, and Nil Desperandum, all provided audiences with sources for interrupting established social and political discourses and re-constructing a vision of the world as it underwent seismic change.

Sources for revolution

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31Today, only eight African states boast national film archives (Lora-Mungai and Pimenta 2021, 37). The fragments of African film collections that have survived were often absorbed inchoately into foreign collections comprising what Jean Allman calls “the postcolonial shadow archive” (Allman 2013, 104–29). The combination of a global film industry centered on the Global North and African institutional film archives that have often suffered significant neglect, has caused scholars such as Aboubakar Sanogo to suggest that “our film history is a diaspora” (Cosgrove 2019). During her training at NAFTI in the mid-2000s, Afonu experienced the apparent historical erasure of Africa’s independence era filmmaking. Even though her supervisor was Jim Panbonor Awindor, whom she interviewed for this issue, Afonu has no recollection of analyzing a single film by a Ghanaian who worked in celluloid filmmaking during her studies: neither Kwaw Ansah (Heritage Africa, 1989), King Ampaw (Kukrantumi, Road to Accra, 1983), Chris Hesse (Operation Congo, 1960), nor Ernest Abbeyquaye (Mother’s Own, 1975). This situation is not simply a question of return, as Perneczky highlights in a roundtable conversation he facilitated on questions of archival restitution between African filmmakers Jihan El-Tahri, Jean-Marie Téno, Nii-Kwate Owoo, and Ali Essafi. To these filmmakers, “the problem of restitution” needs to be rethought “not from the holding institution’s point of view but through the experience of the African filmmakers as image claimants” (Perneczky 2025).

32Such issues are of particular importance to a new generation of African artists, scholars, and filmmakers who are being unsettled and challenged by the remnants of African independence era film heritage. Didi Cheeka, who describes himself as an “accidental archivist,” found in the Nigerian Film Corporation Lagos offices, which had formerly been occupied by the colonial era Nigerian Film Unit, a collection of neglected films. Cheeka described the scene by remarking that “in those dusty vinegar-scented backrooms, were memory’s ruins” (Cheeka 2023, 66). In rusted cans were forgotten films, such as Adamu Halilu’s Shehu Umar (1976), and the Federal government’s visions of the Nigerian Biafra war. The collection has since been relocated to the Nigerian National Film, Video, and Sound Archive in Jos where digitization initiatives have resulted in new works based on archival footage by Cheeka (Memory Also Die, 2020), Ogochukwu Umeadi (No Let Dem Die, 2024), and Immaculata Abba (Our Bodies, Nigeria’s Ghosts, 2024), among others.

33Newsreels and government-sponsored films deteriorating in film vaults are not only sources for understanding previous revolutionary periods in Africa’s past, but they also hold the radical potential to spark liberatory imaginings of a future not yet realized. African filmmakers, such as Renée Mboya (A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, 2001) and Onyeka Igwe (No Archive Can Restore You, 2020), have found in African audiovisual collections creative materials and conditions to contend with what Mboya calls “the colonial matrix of power that continues to permeate the psychosocial fabric of the present” (Mboya 2021). Jedlowski (2025) highlights a very different target for such cinematic reclamation, specifically the initiatives of the AAMOD, such as the Archivio delle Memorie Migranti that exhibits the history of African migrant crossings to Europe and which shows the role archives “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 [in Europe]” (ibid.).

34Archival recovery is urgent work for contemporary African storytellers, scholars, and artists. The collective labor of Chris Hesse, Judith Opoku-Boateng, Rebecca Ohene-Asah, and Anita Afonu in Ghana to restore and digitize state audiovisual collections, is one of several examples on the continent of the archival film turn. The Reframing Africa Project, a research initiative of the University of the Witwatersrand, strove to raise “general archival consciousness as a way of rallying support for the urgent task of preserving the archive of African cinemas” within South Africa (Kros, Auguiste and Khan 2022, vii). In Senegal, Tizianna Manfredi and Marco Lena, with the Direction de la Cinématographie du Sénégal, are working to help restore Senegal’s newsreels from 1966–76 (Manfredi and Lena 2020).

35It is our contention that films are revolutionary when they gesture towards a cause, a problem that needed to be solved, a process of transformation that reaches out to a new future which its audiences are implicated in. These are a form of creative revolution: processes that rely on the past to create a new definition of the future. This echoes Marie-Aude Fouéré’s investigation into young Zanzibari audiences in 2016, who after the decades-long suppression of alternate public histories following the revolution, were using YouTube footage of the racist 1964 Italian shockumentary, Africa Addio, “to revisit the past and rethink Zanzibari society in the present” (Fouéré 2016, 82–96).

36African film—restituted, used as material for new productions, and screened—can undo colonial injustices and re-appropriate the ruins of emancipatory ideals that were stifled by nationalist and postcolonial narratives. “Revolutionary” film remnants can continue to serve dominant power structures and populist politics. This is a burning question in Peterson and Vokes’s work on the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation’s (UBC) 1970s film collection discussed in this issue, which gives an unparalleled insight into the state-sponsored filmmaking that lionized Amin and justified his clampdown on minorities. Peterson and Vokes’ support of the digitization and restoration of Idi Amin’s audiovisual archive raises pressing ethical questions about the restoration of these “revolutionary” films, such as who should get access to them. Such considerations were central to Katherine Groo’s controversial critique of “the ‘commonsense’ empirical impulses of film history” to acquire and preserve as much material—most centrally, the films themselves—for empirical study (Groo 2019, 27). Her argument, which emphasizes the ephemerality of film as that which evades empirical mastery, may seem intensely insensitive when considering the state of African film archives. But her gesture to consider the ethics of film by rooting the discussion of film restoration into something more than an artefact of history makes it imperative to consider revolutionary film not simply as stable objects of the past, but as revolving projections of imaged liberatory futures that may help serve ethnic chauvinism and present-day populists.

37Unfortunately, who decides which African films get preserved, restored, and made accessible (and to whom) is often outside of the communities who are depicted. As a 2021 UNESCO report stated, “the best surviving elements of historic African films are almost never found in Africa” (Lora-Mungai and Pimenta 2021, 37). Indeed, the widespread diffusion of the postcolonial film archive amongst repositories in the Global North raises issues about the politics and ethics of restitution and reparative practice, which sit outside the framework of colonial redress. In both Perneczky and Igor Karim and Sophia Thubauville’s essays in this issue, the complexity of restitution is discussed in relation to the potential and limits of found-footage, that is, African filmmaking practices that use colonial films as sources for revolutionary critique. In discussing ethnographic films produced in southern Ethiopia held by the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt am Main, Karim and Thubauville optimistically argue for working with Ethiopian filmmakers to re-edit, and thus recontextualize for contemporary audiences 1950s imperial ethnographic encounters documented on film. As such, they seek to reimagine “ethnographic archives as spaces for epistemic transformation” as part of recent movements to decolonize archives, libraries, and museums (Karim and Thubauville 2025). They argue that found-footage filmmaking has the power to “dismantle the colonial and scientific ideologies embedded in ethnographic films” through recontextualization (ibid.). Rather than theorize what the potential of found-footage filmmaking could do to “subvert the intentions of the original footage but also [to] reclaim its imagery to affirm Indigenous perspectives and alternative epistemologies” as Karim and Thubeauville do in their essay, Nikolaus Perneczky shows how each of the films he analyzes offer different approaches to the archive and found-footage filmmaking at the same time that “each confronted the betrayals of the African revolution” and recorded evidence of the revolution’s “unfulfilled promises” (Perneczky 2025).

38In one sense, it is the scarcity of visual sources available to reckon with the quarantined past which drives people toward using film as a source for political worldmaking. But it is also the apparent truth claims and the immediacy of film, coupled with the affective registers that film can invoke in its viewers, that reveal, as Annouchka de Andrade puts it, “le pouvoir du film” (Andrade et al. 2025). French film critic, André Bazin once said that cinema was “change mummified” (Bazin 1960, 8). In this issue, in which films are not simply inert artefacts from the past, but documents in political motion—cinema becomes a source for change. Whether that change happens in the emotional responses of individual viewers, the new forms created by artists, or in political mass action, the mercurial politics of film makes it a medium for revolution. The affordances of this journal, which publishes the sources of academic scholarship alongside the peer-reviewed articles, allows the material conditions for creative aspirations toward liberatory futures to continue to (r)evolve. Such is the power of sources, African revolutionary film or otherwise.