See My World Film Festival Brings Pan-African Cinema to Manchester

By Elena Vasquez

See My World will stage a one-day film festival at Manchester's Contact theatre on Saturday 21 November, running from 2pm to 11pm and dedicated to independent creators from across the African diaspora in the north of England.

The festival forms part of See My World's year-round programme of pan-African arts, culture and events. Its intellectual foundations lie with two Kenyan writers: John Mbiti, the Anglican theologian who died in 2019, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, author of the 1986 book Decolonising the Mind, who died last year.

What philosophy drives the programme?

Tunde Adekoya, See My World's CEO and artistic director, said the event takes inspiration from across the spectrum of pan-African thought. Central to it is Mbiti's concept of Sasa na Zamani, in which the past informs everything that happens moving forward.

Adekoya said: "That reflects how we constantly go back to pan-African histories to inform how we progress."

Both writers rejected the colonial conceit that African thought was inferior. Each stressed the importance of community and saw reclaiming African ways of knowing as essential to a people's self-understanding. The two diverged sharply in method. Mbiti sought common ground between African religions and Christianity; Ngũgĩ was a Marxist who argued colonialism was motivated by cultural and economic conquest, with language as European powers' sharpest instrument. Ngũgĩ famously abandoned English to write in Gikuyu, a Bantu language spoken mainly in Kenya, and criticised the role missionary Christianity played in colonial rule.

What connects the festival to 1945?

The event reflects the determination among creatives and activists in Manchester to build on the legacy of the 1945 Pan-African Congress, held in the city, which connected luminaries of postwar independence movements with a shared vision of liberation. That push intensified after last year's 80th-anniversary commemorations.

"It's a day dedicated to pan-African and global majority films from the north of England with exclusive premieres of documentaries we've been working on, which weave together expressions of liberation through art forms like poetry and dance," Adekoya said. "The whole idea is that it's like a playground in search of strategies of liberation, using the festival as a way to explore different philosophies."

Which films will screen?

Filmmakers have been invited to submit works lasting up to 30 minutes, across all genres, with no screening fees charged. Alongside submissions, the festival will show documentaries produced by See My World:

• Homage — a "cinematic love letter to dance" tracing a culture through present-day portraits of dance artists and archival material from Manchester, telling a story of joy, loss, migration, rhythm and resistance.
• Poetic Justice — an exploration of how pan-African thought and Manchester's poetry scene speak across decades.

How does it challenge festival convention?

Adekoya said the format deliberately departs from standard festival practice. "The idea is that we would go against the norm of how film festivals are, because when we think about decolonisation, we think about how structures have been created to alienate and exclude communities," he said.

"So we thought our film festival would look more at how we make film accessible and how stories that deserve to be seen get seen. Throughout the day we will have different activities, from exhibitions to explorations of our performances, discussions, Q&As, insights into directors' processes, and workshops."

He added: "We've been looking for literature and concepts that inform us and give us an understanding of who we truly are. And as works from thinkers like John Mbiti have come into our sphere, they have really emboldened us to think differently about our place in the world and what we do."

With free submissions, an eleven-hour running time and a programme built on decolonial theory rather than competition, the festival offers a working test of whether African philosophy can restructure a European cultural format. The result, on 21 November at Contact theatre on Oxford Road, will show whether accessibility-first programming can become a replicable model rather than a one-day experiment.