Film
Library-in-Residence
Special Project

Ciné Césaire: The Film Programme

June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive and The Otolith Collective

Date and Time:: Sunday 30 Aug, 1-4pm
Location:: 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.

Cine Césaire: The Film Programme screens Euzhan Palcy’s trilogy Aimé Césaire, une voix pour l’histoire (Aimé Césaire: A Voice for History) (1994). Palcy's films combine interviews, dialogues, and testimonial forms which emerge from a longstanding friendship between director and subject to constitute cine-portraits that are simultaneously intimate and expansive.

Each work charts its own course through the legacy of Aimé Césaire; from the revolutionary poetry of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal in 1939 and the incendiary declaration of Discours sur le colonialisme in 1950 to the insurgent universalism of his Lettre à Maurice Thorez in 1959, the anti-colonial dramaturgy of Le Tragédie du roi Christophe in 1963, and Une saison au Congo in 1966.

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

All three parts of Aimé Césaire, une voix pour l'histoire will be shown on Sunday 30 August in the Minassa, from 1–4pm.

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

Image credit: still from Aimé Césaire: une voix pour l'histoire (1994), directed by Euzhan Palcy © JMJ International Pictures

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 pioneering experience and expertise in global African, Caribbean and Afrodiasporic cinemas for over 30 years is widely recognised. The development of the June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive (JGPACA) is based on her decades long collection. The ambition of the JGPACA is to disseminate this invaluable heritage collection as widely as possible. 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, to develop and elaborate Black British Independent cinema 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 British Film Unit, edited the quarterly magazine Black Film Bulletin and organised the conference Africa and the History of Cinematic Ideas at the British Film Institute. In 2000, she edited the publication Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image and programmed Planet Africa at the Toronto International Film Festival. Givanni has worked as a film curator with festivals on five continents and has been involved in the development of an infrastructural ecology for Pan-African cinema within, between and across these continents.

Damilola Lemomu is an archivist and film programmer whose work engages with Pan-African film culture and explores archival materials as living infrastructures. She is Project Curator and Archivist at the June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive (JGPACA), co-organiser of Otherfield Film Festival, and Programme Adviser for the 2026 Sheffield Documentary Festival. She also teaches documentary filmmaking in alternative education contexts and is a member of the Rio Cinema Archive Working Group Advisory Board, supporting the preservation and activation of a 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

- Library-in-Residence
- Special Project
Ciné Césaire: The Exhibition
June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive and The Otolith Collective
26 Aug – 6 Sep

Ciné Césaire: The Film Programme

Related

Ciné Césaire: The Exhibition