“Post Memory, Post Archive” is a year-long fellowship designed by Oluwadara Omotoso and Ese Emmanuel and supported by the Goethe-Institut Nigeria, the Lagos branch of Germany’s publicly funded cultural institution. The program brought together 11 Nigerian filmmakers and cultural practitioners to engage directly with the country’s fragile film heritage.
The fellowship began with a visit to the National Film, Video, and Sound Archives (NFVSA) in Jos, Plateau State, in October 2024, where the cohort observed restoration and digitization processes. In January 2025, they traveled to Ibadan, Oyo State, to work with the Institute of African Studies Archives and Demas Nwoko’s New Culture Studios—Nwoko being an architect, designer, and theater pioneer associated with the Zaria Art Society, who founded the studio as a hub for modernist African art and performance.
Further sessions in Jos included meetings with film scholars, while the group also visited the National Library in the city, which provides a broader research base for scholars and cultural practitioners.
The program also incorporated work in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, where the National Archives houses colonial and post-independence government records, including documents relevant to film policy.
Taken together, these visits combined state-run repositories with independent cultural spaces, giving the cohort a cross-section of how Nigerian film history is preserved, accessed, and reinterpreted.
The initiative builds on earlier archival work that began in 2015, when Nigerian film critic and archivist Didi Cheeka, Goethe-Institut Lagos director Marc-André Schmachtel, Nigerian critic Oris Aigbokhaevbolo, and program officer Derin Ajao discovered corroding film cans in storage rooms of the Nigerian Film Corporation in Lagos. That discovery led to the restoration and screening of Adamu Halilu’s “Shaihu Umar” (1976) and created momentum for new institutional partnerships.
The fellowship culminated in a public screening of 11 short films produced by the program on August 16–17, 2025, at the Nigerian Film Corporation in Lagos.
In parallel, funding from the German Cultural Heritage Fund, part of the German Foreign Ministry, and collaboration with the Goethe University Frankfurt, the German Film Institute & Film Museum, and the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin supported the launch of a Master’s program in Film Culture and Archival Studies with the National Film Institute and the University of Jos.
Dr. Nadine Siegert, director of the Goethe-Institut Nigeria since 2021, described “Post Memory, Post Archive” as an extension of this decade-long cultural exchange. “Thanks to Ese and Oluwadara, they emphasized the need to work on film again,” she says. “They argued for looking beyond mainstream Nollywood and engaging the depth of Nigeria’s film history.”
For Ese Emmanuel, who also served as curator, the archive was not a fixed repository but a living body of material that could be fragmented, reworked, and recontextualized for contemporary use. “Memory alone was insufficient,” she explains. “The central questions were: How is knowledge of the past embedded in our understanding of the present? How might it help shape a future no longer marked by colonial violence but molded through care?”
The 11 Short Films from the Archive
The fellowship moved from research visits to production, with each participant developing a short film in response to the archival experience. Following the October 2024 sessions in Jos and the January 2025 research in Ibadan, the works were completed in time for a public screening on August 16–17, 2025, at the Nigerian Film Corporation in Lagos. The 11 films are:
- “Between Shadows and Light” (Babatunde Tribe) — Examines how queer Nigerian identities and subcultures have been erased from the country’s film history.
- “Palimpsest of Her Flesh” (Ebimoboere Dan-Asisah) — Focuses on images of Nigerian women in domestic spaces, following them from childhood through adulthood.
- “A Body in Metaphor” (Amanda Madumere) — Analyzes the sexualization of women’s bodies in African films, including Hussein Shariffe’s “The Dislocation of Amber,” Souleymane Cissé’s “Yeelen” and “Den Muso,” Djibril Diop Mambéty’s “Touki Bouki,” and Ousmane Sembène’s “Xala.”
- “Festac 77: Exploration of Heritage” (Yusuf Ishaya, Eiseke Bolaji, Olabode Moses, Azeezah Adekambi) — Looks at how the 1977 Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture is remembered in Nigeria and across Africa.
- “Don’t Let Them Die” (Ogochukwu Umeadi) — Argues for the importance of mother tongues in shaping cultural and national identity.
- “Reflection of Memory” (Osho Abiodun) — Investigates how individual memory relates to suppressed accounts of Nigeria’s past.
- “Kehinsokun” (Mide Gbadegesin) — Uses animation to retell Yoruba stories and symbols as part of cultural history.
- “Common Grounds” (Philip Fagbeyiro) — Considers who controls and uses public leisure spaces in Lagos.
- “Memoirs of the Soil” (Eieke Bolaji) — Revisits Nigeria’s agricultural expansion and asks what political and economic changes the land itself records.
- “Our Bodies, Nigeria’s Ghosts” (Immaculata Abba) — Explores how colonial history continues to shape Nigerian and African identity.
- “Memory Also Die” (Didi Cheeka) — Connects personal and national experiences of forgetting to show how memory functions as political resistance.
Archives, Power, and Responsibility
The films took different forms, ranging from experimental work to animation to documentary reflection. Each one addressed a specific aspect of Nigeria’s history or culture—whether language, gender, public space, agriculture, or collective memory—showing how archival material can be used to make arguments about identity, access, and politics in the present.
The urgency of this work is sharpened by Nigeria’s history of suppressing historical inquiry. Audiovisual archives often sit in poor condition or with restricted access. Emmanuel argues that cultural history can also be recovered outside state institutions, drawing on oral traditions and what novelist Toni Morrison called “Rememory,” the idea that ancestral experience can be carried within collective memory.
Cheeka describes current archival neglect as “a more-or-less conscious war on memory,” with governments allowing heritage to deteriorate for political reasons. Rediscovering and presenting forgotten footage, he argues, is not only about technical preservation but about rewriting film history in ways that address silences and traumas.
Cheeka also situates Nigerian archival practice in relation to larger debates in film history. He recalls Jean-Luc Godard’s criticism of cinema for failing to record the atrocities of concentration camps, and responds by pointing to the footage of the Biafran War held at Nigeria’s National Film, Video and Sound Archive. For him, the question is not whether cinema recorded events but how political context shaped what was recorded, and how those images can be misused if treated uncritically.
This perspective connects back to the 2015 discovery of decaying film cans from the old Colonial Film Unit, which Nigeria inherited from Britain. Cheeka describes the neglect of archives as a betrayal of the anti-colonial struggle, arguing that archival practice in Africa is necessarily subversive: it asks what political decisions led to the burial of national memory, and what fragments can still be recovered from oral traditions or the absence of actual archives.
Access to this history is still limited by bureaucracy. Across Africa, archivists, researchers, and filmmakers encounter rules and restrictions that prevent wider public use of archives. Emmanuel argues that cultural history should be pursued in multiple ways, with state institutions being only one option. She stresses the importance of drawing on elders’ memories and communal traditions, an approach that also shaped her curatorial work.
Siegert observes that some Nigerian state institutions, including the Nigerian Film Corporation and the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilization (CBAAC), have recently shown more willingness to collaborate, which may expand access in the future. Meanwhile, external institutions, like Goethe-Institut Nigeria, continue to provide resources and continuity, but their role also speaks to unresolved questions of ownership and accountability when outside bodies take on responsibilities that should rest with national institutions.
“Post Memory, Post Archive” operates as both custodian and producer of cultural memory. It preserves Nigeria’s audiovisual heritage while providing younger cultural workers with the opportunity to engage directly with it, turning archival material into new films that speak to the present. In a context where Nigerian and African film archives, more broadly, face uneven support and barriers to access, the fellowship demonstrated one way artists can engage with that history and keep it active in contemporary practice.
Seyi Lasisi is a Nigerian-based film critic and culture journalist.