Unhousing Restitution: African audiovisual heritage between displacement and return (UNREST) will research and disseminate new, Africa-led and practice-oriented methodologies and models for restitution of displaced African film heritage. For twentieth-century anti-colonial movements and postcolonial states, cinema was a key medium for articulating and popularising decolonisation. Yet years of resource poverty and political inaction have left a film heritage landscape marked by neglect and material destruction. Vast swaths of newsreels, documentary and feature films—films that captured the major events and experiences of the decolonisation years—are either lost, or sequestered in the archives of the Global North. Only a handful of African states boast national film archives; UNESCO concluded in 2021 that African cinema’s “best surviving elements” are “almost never found in Africa.” 

For two years from January 2026, UNREST researchers will work with ten international partners to identify and disseminate Africa-led solutions to this egregious cultural loss. Bringing together an interdisciplinary research team from film studies, African history and digital humanities, and a partner network spanning Cairo, Accra, Tamale, Berlin, Khartoum and London, UNREST will develop and test new approaches to audiovisual heritage restitution, from collaborative historical research to community digital archiving and creative reuse. Focusing on case studies from Sudan and Ghana, we will pioneer approaches to digital repatriation, and run two landmark creative projects of reclamation, led by award-winning Sudanese, Egyptian and Ghanaian filmmakers and artists, and engaging dispossessed and displaced communities in reimagining the art and scholarship of African moving image archives. The project will move restitution debates from a focus on the politics of return, to practices of shared transnational history-making, collaborative infrastructure development and African-led creative renewal.