Hybrid event held in person at the Black Film Center & Archive at IU Bloomington and via Zoom. 

Co-panelists Ibee Ndaw, Coordinator of the Yennega Center, Dakar (Sénégal), and IU scholars Michael Martin, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and Founder & Editor-in-Chief of Black Camera. An International Film Journal, Novotny Lawrence, Associate Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Black Film Center & Archive, Claire Fouchereaux, PhD student in French and Francophone Studies. Moderator: Akin Adesokan, Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and Comparative Literature.

While the debate on the restitution of African heritage focuses on artifacts, a growing number of initiatives by artists, filmmakers and institutions are concerned with assessing and restoring to African audiences the African film archives that remain in the collections of Western institutions, particularly in France and the United States. But as the Senegalese Felwine Sarr and the French Benedicte Savoy point out in the report Restitution of the African Cultural Heritage: Towards a New Relational Ethics (2018), commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron, the restitution of artifacts and film heritage are linked, as both play a central role in the process of reconstructuring peoples' memories after the slave trade and colonization. The Restitute African Film Archives project aims to create a space for research and curatorial experimentations on issues related to the restitution of African film heritage since the 1980s. First of all, it aims to identify the collections - indeed, both Sarr and Savoy stress that the restitution of African cultural heritage requires a precise knowledge of African collections - what and where are they? - and how they can be returned and circulated on the African continent.