About UNREST
Bringing together an interdisciplinary research team from film studies, African history and digital humanities, and a partner network spanning Cairo, Accra, Tamale, Berlin, Khartoum and London, UNREST will develop and test new approaches to audiovisual heritage restitution, from collaborative historical research to community digital archiving and creative reuse.
Focusing on case studies from Sudan (the archive of exile artist-filmmaker Hussein Shariffe) and Ghana (50 early post-independence films from the Ghana Film Industry Corporation), the project will pioneer approaches to digital repatriation, and run two landmark creative projects of reclamation. Two year-long creative labs will be led by award-winning Sudanese, Egyptian and Ghanaian filmmakers and artists; they will engage dispossessed and displaced communities in reimagining the art and scholarship of African moving image archives. The project will move restitution debates from a focus on the politics of return, to practices of shared transnational history-making, collaborative infrastructure development and African-led creative renewal.
The Team
Professor Erica Carter
King’s College London
Dr Dan Hodgkinson
University of Oxford
Dr Samar Abdelrahman
University of Liverpool
Sara El-Nagar
King’s College London
Rose Myonga
King’s College London
The Advisory Board
- Dr Imruh Bakari Co-Director, June Givanni Pan-African Cinema Archive (JGPACA), London; Senior Fellow in Knowledge Exchange (Emeritus), University of Winchester https://notablepeopleproject.org/imruh_bakari
- Prof Marilyn Deegan Professor Emerita and Honorary Research Fellow, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, and Principal Investigator of the Sudan Memory project https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/professor-marilyn-deegan
- Revd. Dr. Chris Tsui Hesse. Presbyterian minister, Ghanaian filmmaker and photographer, former personal cinematographer to President Kwame Nkrumah, former Head of the Ghana Film Industry Corporation, current custodian of the Ghana Film Industry Corporation Archive https://ghananipa.com/2024/09/24/christian-tsui-hesse/
- Dr Laurence Kent Lecturer in Digital Film and Television, University of Bristol https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/persons/laurence-kent/
- Prof Jyoti Mistry Professor of Film in the Film, Photography and Literary Composition Unit, University of Gothenburg https://www.gu.se/en/about/find-staff/jyotimistry
- Dr Nikolaus Perneczky Teaching Associate, University of Cambridge Digital Humanities; former Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, Queen Mary University of London (2022-2025) project title ‘Restitution and the Moving Image: Decolonising Global Film Heritage’
- Prof Derek Peterson Ali Mazrui Collegiate Professor of History and African Studies, University of Michigan, PI of the Digitising the Cinema Film Archive of the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation Project https://derekrpeterson.com/