ONYEKA IGWE: AND LET HISTORY BEGIN

In 2021 THFF was pleased to present several short films by Onyeka Igwe that interrogated colonial moving-image archives and the ghosts therein. This year, we are honored to have Onyeka at the Festival to present And Let History Begin, a program that proposes as its point of departure a speculative history of Pan-African solidarity, aimed at a radical reimagining of the (post)colonial narrative.

Anti-colonial intellectuals, artists, and activists like Nigeria’s Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, and Trinidad’s George Padmore were all in the heart of Empire—London—in 1947. They were imagining a world after colonialism, but did they meet? And if they all did, what did they discuss, what did they conjure? A Radical Duet (2023, 28’) is a dual-timeline hybrid film by Onyeka Igwe about two women of different generations—one Jamaican, the other Nigerian—who come together in London in 1947 to put their fervor and imagination into writing a revolutionary play. 

Immediately following the screening, Onyeka will direct a cast of Miami actors in a performance of an extract of Maskarade (1973), a play by the Caribbean theoretician, playwright, novelist, and intellectual Sylvia Wynter, whose biography and theorisations were vital in the development of this film and the larger research project which propose storytelling as essential to imagining the world otherwise.

*A Q+A with Onyeka Igwe will follow the program.