For our season finale, we will be screening William Klein’s Algiers Pan-African Festival (1969). In July 1969, while western audiences were glued to their TV screens watching the first landings on the moon, thousands of artists and politicians from across the African continent and diaspora were looking in a very different direction. They had gathered in Algiers for the first Pan African Cultural Festival, speaking and performing to audiences of hundreds of thousands. Charting the festivities and euphoria as well as intense debates about the future of African politics and culture, it features – amongst many others – Nina Simone, Archie Shepp and Miriam Makeba.

The discussion panel will include contributions from Walid Benkhaled (Bodleian Library, expert on Algerian cinema), Peter Brooke (African Studies Centre, scholar of mass media, politics and culture in Africa), Lyn Kouadio (University College, Beacon JRF in Postcolonial and Race Studies) and Ruth Shoo University of Oxford, historian and cultural studies scholar working on the intellectual and social history of pan-Africanism).

Reserve your spot now for the final screening in the Decolonisation in Motion film season – film and speakers to be announced soon!

This event is part of the ‘Decolonisation in Motion’ film season organised by University College at the Bodleian Library, 10 October-14 November 2023 www.univ.ox.ac.uk/news/decolonisation-in-motion