In this opening event of the ‘Decolonisation in Motion’ film season, we explore how and why filmmaking became a weapon of African anti-colonial movements from the late 1950s onwards as well as a tool of nation-building in newly independent states. The talk will be interwoven with a series of rarely seen film shorts, including Pierre Clément’s Sakiet-Sidi-Youssef (1958), René Vautier’s Algeria in Flames (1958) [courtesy of Moira Chappedelaine-Vautier] and Paulin Soumanou Vieyra’s A Nation is Born (1961).

With Walid Benkhaled (Bodleian Library), documentary maker and specialist in post-colonial cinema, and Natalya Vince (University College, Oxford), historian of decolonisation in the Francophone world.