I arrived hungry — for food and for films too, as dear Seyi, an industry colleague, cut in when I mentioned the state of my belly upon arrival. I had skipped breakfast at home, determined to get to the event location on time for the first film slated for 11:40 am. On Sunday, August 17, I found myself stepping into the world of Post-Memory, Post-Archive, a two-day event organised by Goethe Institute Nigeria in collaboration with the Nigeria Film Corporation. Over two days, 11 short films premiered across the screenings.
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The essence of the project is to rescue early Nigerian cinema from forgotten storage and bring it into active conversation with today’s filmmakers and audiences. Rather than preserving films as static objects, the project initiated by Ese Emmanuel and Oluwadara Omotoso encourages filmmakers to engage with archives as sources of inspiration, creating work that reinterprets, questions, and amplifies history.
The filmmakers’ journey began long before this screening. Their first encounter with archival materials was at the National Film, Video and Sound Archive (NFVSA) in October 2024, where they witnessed the processes of restoration and digitisation. In January 2025, they visited several archives in Ibadan, researching materials for their upcoming projects. Another visit to Jos included sessions with Professor Onookome Okome, a Nigerian film scholar who offered feedback and critical reflections, helping the cohort think more deeply about working with archival content.
The Sunday event, which was the second day of screenings, began in a way that immediately set the tone: with breakfast. A piece of cake, waffles, and tea. It was an easy entry into what would turn out to be a deeply emotional day of film, memory, and conversation.
The first set of screenings began shortly after an opening remark from Ifeoluwa Olutayo, one of the Goethe Institute cohort. Each film drew from different fragments of the Nigerian archive and transformed them into a new form: personal, political, and poetic meditations. Some of the films leaned into the unspoken legacies of the Nigerian Civil War, while others explored the relationship between memory, the body and the environment—soil, land, and the histories inscribed within them. Watching them, I realised the archive is not just something stored away, it is something living, capable of pressing itself into our present.
One of the screenings was No Let Dem Die by Ogochukwu Umeadi. The documentary film is both a plea and a warning: it insists on the urgency of preserving language and culture, reminding us that when traditions are neglected, they do not simply vanish, they take pieces of us with them. Umeadi’s work lingered in my mind, its message is very relatable as I sat thinking of what piece of my culture I can pass down to the next generation. For me, this film extends far beyond the screen into our everyday choices about what we do or do not carry forward.
Still on the first set of films, a work-in-progress that really made me lean forward (yes, that meme comes to mind) was a documentary based on Hubert Ogunde’s Atoka Photo Play called Kehinsokun. Since it’s still in development, only a five-minute snippet was shown. The preview features ethnic drums and narration that aims to interpret the still images from Ogunde’s play, filling the screen. These are paired with speech bubbles inside the pictures, giving them the feel of a comic strip.
Another film that held the audience’s attention was Memory Also Die by Didi Cheeka, a filmmaker and film archivist. I say it held the audience’s attention because it is a silent film, so when the hall fell quiet, you were forced to look to see if it was a glitch or if what’s on screen is really what we’re watching. Cheeka’s film returns us to the post-war (as he prefers to call it) era in Nigeria. It explores how memory refuses to fade, how even when a war ends, its presence stays, sometimes soft, sometimes heavy, but always there. The film gives language to something I think many Nigerians carry: the awareness that the past is never really past. I wondered why he chose the silent medium, and a lady who had the same thought took the liberty to ask about the silent direction.
In his response, he stated how he did not want to use external sound that wasn’t from the footage itself, as he wanted to make his film within the limitations and confines of the archive material he had access to.
Among the day’s screenings was Common Grounds by Philip Fagbeyiro, which offers a brief look into the settlements of Lagos, how housing, displacement, and history intersect in the city. It is a film about structures of shelter, about the ways people inhabit and make meaning out of limited, sometimes precarious, space.
Between screenings, we had moments to pause, a bathroom break here, a small stretch of conversation there, before diving back into the next set of films. What made the day even more engaging was the presence of the filmmakers themselves. After each group of screenings, they came forward to share the processes behind their work, the decisions that guided them, the challenges of working with archival material, and the ways the past seemed to speak to them in unexpected forms. Audience members, too, added their opinions, including ways some of the films could be better, and sometimes challenged the perspectives offered on screen. This back-and-forth gave the event a communal feel, as though we were all piecing together the archive in real time.
In a conversation with Danjuma, a cohort from the Nigeria Film Corporation, I mentioned how this particular event feels like nothing I had ever attended, and he made sure to share how this programme is one of the first of its kind. It truly felt novel. The day concluded with a screening of Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl. Watching it with others, after seeing it alone previously, was profoundly different. The shared reactions, quiet moments, and collective attention made the film feel alive in a new way.
By the end of the day, it felt less like we had merely attended a film screening and more like we had participated in a living dialogue between past and present, memory and forgetting.
Post-Memory, Post-Archive is only beginning its journey. Screenings and conversations will follow this first stop in Kaduna, Jos, Abuja, Ibadan, and Enugu, the home cities of the participating filmmakers. Each stop promises not only to showcase films but also to spark conversations about history, identity, and the stories we choose to preserve.
For me, attending the event was a reminder that archives are not just repositories of old footage. They are living bodies of memory, open to interpretation and reinvention. And in the hands of these filmmakers, they become something urgent, beautiful, and deeply necessary.
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