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©Cinémathèque marocaine

2026 Rabat Symposium

Session 1 - Opening Remarks and Day 1 Keynote Speech

Rabat, 27 April 2026

Please do not publish or re-use in any way any of these documents without prior permission of the speakers.

Opening of the 2026 Symposium

Narjiss Nejjar (Director, Cinémathèque marocaine)

Peter Bagrov (President, FIAF)

Remarks of the 2026 Symposium Scientific Committee

Cecilia Cenciarelli (Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna)

Mohamed Challouf (Association Ciné-Sud Patrimoine)

Tamer El Said (Cimatheque - Alternative Film Center)

Arike Oke (British Film Institute)

Stefanie Schulte Strathaus (Arsenal Filminstitut)

Léonce Tira (Cinémathèque Africaine de Ouagadougou - FESPACO)

Keynote - FIAF in Africa, Africa at FIAF: A Historical Perspective

Aboubakar Sanogo (Carleton University)

This paper takes the occasion of the 2026 FIAF Symposium to critically examine the historical relationship between FIAF and the African continent. When FIAF came into being in 1938, over 90% of the African continent was under colonial rule and WWII had, according to African historians, already begun in 1935 with Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, hitherto the only non-colonized country on the continent. Eighty-eight years later, FIAF currently counts 11 affiliates out of 94 from Africa and is hosting its third Congress on the continent.

What has the relationship been between FIAF and Africa in the past eight decades? How has FIAF as an institution, an apparatus, a community, a spirit, a horizon, and indeed a desired global archival commons interacted with the continent? What kind of initiatives, projects, programmes, has the Federation deployed toward the African continent? What kinds of gazes has it cast and to what effect?

Using documents from FIAF’s own institutional archives as well as testimonies from FIAF affiliates involved in Africa-related/oriented initiatives and activities, including discourse production, discrete projects, training programmes, Congresses held in Africa or emphasizing African issues, and from representatives of African archives within FIAF and other African stakeholders of the archive, this paper critically examines, historicize and periodize said relationships from the colonial era, the age of independence through to the 2000s, highlighting recurrent themes, tendencies and issues, moments of emphasis and de-emphasis, as well as ruptures and accelerations, to fully account for the complexities of the FIAF-Africa relationship.