Library-in-Residence
Special Project

Ciné Césaire: The Exhibition

June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive and The Otolith Collective

Date and Time:: 26 Aug – 6 Sep
Location:: Iqra & Minassa

Ciné Césaire is a collaboration between Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun of The Otolith Collective and Dr June Givanni and Damilola Lemomu of Excavating Legacies. This exhibition, film programme, and public conversation explores the film work of Sarah Maldoror and Euzhan Palcy dedicated to the life and work of the revolutionary poet, dramatist, essayist and politician Aimé Césaire.

This project is part of Excavating Legacies, the intergenerational programme developed by Dr June Givanni that connects Pan-African cinema across five continents through exhibitions, screenings, publications and workshops.

Cine Césaire: The Exhibition is hosted at A Flock of Keen-Eyed and Far-Seeing Magpies, The Otolith Collective's Library in Residence. It brings together posters, photographs, publications, and festival ephemera from the June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive and Dr Givanni’s private archive together with poetry, theory, and dramatic texts from the library itself.

In conversation with these materials, Ciné Césaire screens Sarah Maldoror's Éia pour Césaire (2009). Made to mark the centenary of his birth, Maldoror's tribute to Césaire offers an intimate meditation on a thinker whose ideas continue to resonate across generations of artists.

This archival constellation situates Maldoror and Palcy’s work within expanded histories of Pan-African and Pan-Caribbean cinema. Ciné Césaire: The Exhibition invites audiences to encounter the infrastructures that enabled the dialogic cinema of Euzhan Palcy and Sarah Maldoror to be projected to the world.

For more information on the programme, please see the attached film notes.

Éia pour Césaire will be screened daily in the Minassa, 2–3pm.

The Otolith Collective are supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Image collage includes:

Exhibition stamp from SARAH MALDOROR. KONTEXT (2024) featuring Et les chiens se taisaient. Courtesy of Sinema Transtopia.

Simeon (1992). Courtesy of Euzhan Palcy.

Le 1er Festival est dédié à Aimé Césaire (1988). Courtesy of Images Caraïbes.

All images are scans from the June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive.

Sarah Maldoror was a French-Guadaloupean filmmaker who produced more than forty films focused on the anti-colonial struggle in Africa and the Caribbean over her career, many of which prioritised the educational potential of the moving image. After moving to Paris to study theatre, Maldoror co-founded Les Griots, the first Afro-Caribbean theatre troupe in France, in 1956 with Ababacar Samb Makharam, Timité Bassori and Toto Bissainthe. Her first short film, Monangambée (1969), a collaboration with her husband Mario Pinto de Andrade, founder of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, envisioned the brutality of Portuguese colonial violence six years before the independence of Angola. Maldoror directed her second groundbreaking film, Sambizanga (1972), often cited as the first feature to have been directed by a woman in Sub-Saharan Africa, in the Peoples Republic of Congo, Central Africa’s first Marxist-Leninist state.

Euzhan Palcy is a Martinican writer, director and producer. Her 1983 feature film Sugar Cane Alley won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival and the César for Best First Film, making her the first Black director to receive both awards. Palcy’s other works include Siméon (1992) and A Dry White Season (1989). Throughout her career, Palcy’s films have been celebrated as both great works of social commentary and displays of her expansive technical expertise.

Dr June Givanni is a BAFTA Award-winning international film curator whose experience and expertise in global African, Caribbean and Afrodiasporic cinemas is widely recognised. The development of the June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive (JGPACA) is based on her decades long collection. Givanni’s work as a programmer began in the early 1980s when organising Third Eye, London’s first Festival of Third World Cinema. Givanni worked as a film programmer at the Greater London Council’s Ethnic Minorities Unit and co-organised Third Cinema: Theories and Practices at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1986. In the 1990s, Givanni ran the African Caribbean Film Unit at the BFI, edited the Black Film Bulletin and organised the conference Africa and the History of Cinematic Ideas. In 2000, she edited Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image and programmed Planet Africa at the Toronto International Film Festival. Givanni's work as a film curator has developed an infrastructural ecology for Pan-African cinema within, between and across five continents.

Damilola Lemomu is an archivist and film curator working across Pan-African film culture, archival research and curatorial practice. She is Project Curator and Archivist at the June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive, co-organiser of Otherfield Film Festival, and Programme Adviser for Sheffield DocFest. As an Advisory Board member of the Rio Cinema Archive Working Group, she contributes to the preservation and activation of a significant community cinema archive in London.

The Otolith Collective is an artist-led organisation that supports intergenerational and intragenerational art practices, research-led projects, writing and process based forms of development. The Otolith Collective creates environments that enable discourse and discussion, co-commission artists and curate exhibitions and programmes with a wide range of collaborators, organisations and institutions. Theirs is an international project based on transnational and translocal visions committed to maintaining and animating an experimental, worldmaking approach. Working across visual art, new music, film, video, writing and post lens-based media, The Otolith Collective draws audiences to exhibitions and platforms on the work of Black Audio Film Collective, Mark Fisher and Justin Barton, The Chimurenga Library, Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, and Bahar Noorizadeh, to name but a few.

Film Notes

- Film
- Library-in-Residence
- Special Project
Ciné Césaire: The Film Programme
June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive and The Otolith Collective
Sunday 30 Aug, 1-4pm

Ciné Césaire: The Exhibition

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Ciné Césaire: The Film Programme