Screening | Restitution Cinema: Interiors

Restitution Cinema is a film program that considers the impossibility of repair, and the traction in reaching for it anyways. It is about the many errant pathways towards recovery, removed from the idealism of a pure pre-colonial, pre-contact past, and rooted in the material, psychic and embodied ways of restoring our cultural endowments in the current anti-colonial terrain.

This block assembles a chorus of voices from 1953 to 2024; interior subjectivities that render a spectral and meditative portrait of objects and remains – abducted, looted, and encased in centuries of deleterious colonial holding that nonetheless bear the faculty to speak back. Take for instance, Pan-African publishing titan Presence Africaine’s Statues Also Die (1953) which was censured and censored by the French government until 1995, the same government which released 26 objects from the collection of the Quai Branly Museum Paris, whose continental return is traced by Mati Diop in Dahomey (2024). The films in this program from Benin, Senegal, Nigeria, the UK, France, and the US assert that there are as many paths to restitution as there are stolen objects and people. Millions, innumerable, unthinkable, with every person and item imbued with spiritual meaning and still worth imagining.

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Curated and organized by Farrah Rahaman, CAMRA Director and supported by the Center for Experimental Ethnography, Department of Cinema and Media Studies and Wolf Humanities Center.

Please enter the Museum through the EAST ENTRANCE. If you are walking towards the museum from campus, this means walking down South Street until the furthest end of the museum, and taking a right once you approach the garages on Convention Avenue.