A pioneering curator, writer and programmer of African film is to receive Bafta’s outstanding British contribution to cinema award.
June Givanni is the founder of a London archive that has amassed more than 10,000 items – including films, ephemera, manuscripts, audio, photography and posters – documenting Pan-African cinema over 40 years.
The volunteer-run archive is one of the world’s most important collections documenting the moving image for the African continent and its diaspora, and includes artefacts that might otherwise not have been preserved.
Items from the June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive (JGPACA)have also formed the basis of public exhibitions – most recently Raven Row in east London.
Givanni, 73, told the Guardian the award “gives us an opportunity to tell people what we’re trying to do, because people’s ideas about archives are so varied … Our long-term goal is to enrich knowledge and understanding of Pan-African cinema’s place within the cultural sector, it’s creative impact and legacy internationally.”
She was born in what was then British Guiana and moved to the UK aged seven. She began her career bringing Third Eye London’s first Festival of Third World Cinema to London, before working as a film programmer at the Greater London Council’s ethnic minorities unit.
She went on to run the BFI’s African-Caribbean unit, and compiled the first comprehensive directory of black and Asian films in the UK, as well as co-editing the BFI’s Black Film Bulletin, which relaunched in 2021 as a quarterly collaboration with Sight and Sound magazine.
She has worked as a film curator on five continents, and her published books include Remote Control: Dilemmas of Black Intervention in British Film and TV and Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image.
Jane Millichip, CEO of Bafta, said Givanni had been “a pioneering force in the preservation, study and celebration of African and African diaspora cinema and Black British cultural heritage”.
The special award will be presented to Givanni during the Baftas ceremony next month. Previous recipients have included Derek Jarman, Ken Loach, Elizabeth Karlsen, Tessa Ross, Ridley Scott and Curzon Cinemas.
Givanni emphasised the importance of archives, which she said were “not just educational, but also culturally enriching”.
She said: “A lot of younger people are amazed by our archive. Because they grew up in the digital age, and they think everything they want to know or need to know is on the internet. And when they come in, it’s so physical, they’re totally blown away. They’re amazed that there’s so much they don’t know.
“It’s a question of expanding people’s minds about what information is, where it is, and how it relates to what is happening now. That’s one of the philosophical concepts from the Ghanaian culture, called Sankofa. It means looking back to better understand the future.”
Givanni added that she believes Pan-African cinema to be a “cinema of resistance” – meaning “it’s a cinema that recognises the value and importance of the African culture and what it can contribute to the world”.
“When I came to the UK from Guyana as a young child in the 50s, I was so shocked at the ignorance of people about who I am,” she said. “I had come from a society where people are quite ambitious, they encourage you, to one where I was put in a class with children two years my junior because they believed I came from a country where you don’t know how to read or write.
“So many times people are not seeing you as someone who has anything to offer. Pan-Africanism has always been about knowing your history and being able to situate the value of that within wherever you find yourself in the world. It’s something all of us need to do.”
