Cinema as Inheritance: Manchester's Pan-African Film Festival Tests an Access-First Model

Eighty years ago, Manchester hosted a congress that helped reshape the postwar world. Delegates from across Africa and the African diaspora gathered in the city in 1945 and produced a declaration demanding an end to colonial rule and the political self-determination of African peoples. The meeting did not end empire on its own. It did something different: it named what liberation required and put that naming on record.

On November 21, a day-long film festival at the Contact theatre will draw a direct line from that congress to the present. See My World, a pan-African arts program led by CEO and artistic director Tunde Adekoya, is staging the event as both a cultural occasion and a deliberate test of an idea. The question the organizers are asking is narrow and practical: can access to film culture be structured differently, so that communities are centered rather than marketed to?

The festival will include documentary premieres, short film submissions, exhibitions, workshops, and discussions with directors. No screening fees will be charged, either to audiences or to filmmakers. That second point is the structural one. Requiring filmmakers to pay submission fees to be considered for a festival is standard practice across the industry. Waiving them removes a barrier that quietly filters out artists without institutional backing. It is a small decision with reach beyond the day itself.

The programming draws heavily on two Kenyan thinkers. The first is John Mbiti, whose concept of Sasa na Zamani describes the past not as something fixed behind us but as an active force that shapes the present. The second is Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, whose critique of colonialism extends to language itself. Ngũgĩ's decision to write in his native Gikuyu rather than in English was a deliberate act of resistance, an argument that the tools of cultural production carry the weight of the systems that built them. Both thinkers inform how the festival is organized, not as decorative reference but as working framework.

Adekoya has said that engaging with thinkers like Mbiti has changed how his team understands their own work and their place in it. The festival is partly an attempt to make that thinking visible. The two documentary premieres, "Homage" and "Poetic Justice," examine the intersection of pan-African thought with Manchester's contemporary cultural scene. Workshops and discussions run alongside the screenings rather than after them, so the day is built as a conversation with films in it, not a showcase with a panel attached.

Manchester is not an incidental choice of venue. The city has a long history of pan-African organizing, and the 1945 congress remains its most consequential episode in that history. The Contact theatre sits inside a city that once convened the dissenters of empires and now convenes their inheritors. That continuity is the festival's premise: the frameworks built by earlier generations for understanding colonialism, identity, and self-determination have not expired. They have been obscured. Looking back here is not nostalgia. It is retrieval.

The scope is intentionally modest. This is a single day, a focused program, a conversation that the organizers themselves acknowledge cannot be resolved in one November. They do not claim the festival will end colonial legacies or redistribute cultural capital in the film industry. What they claim is more specific: that access can be structured differently, that the intellectual inheritance of 1945 has practical weight when applied to something as concrete as who gets a screen and who does not, and that communities deserve to be treated as participants rather than audiences.

Skeptics will note, reasonably, that principled programming at a one-day festival is a long way from systemic change. Film culture remains heavily concentrated, with resources, distribution, and prestige flowing toward established institutions and established names. A festival in Manchester does not dissolve those structures. What it can do is demonstrate an alternative arrangement and document whether it holds together.

That is the meaningful test. Film festivals, like most cultural institutions, have developed practices that reflect the interests of whoever built them. Submission fees, hierarchies of programming, the gap between panel participants and general audiences: none of these are natural laws. They are habits. See My World is running a day-long argument that the habits can be changed and the event will still work.

Whether the model travels is a genuine open question, and the organizers are careful not to overpromise. A method demonstrated once is not yet a movement. It becomes something more durable only when other institutions look at what was done and decide to replicate it, or when audiences begin to expect the access-first approach as a baseline rather than a novelty.

The 1945 congress produced its declaration. What followed took decades and remained, by any honest accounting, unfinished. The festival on November 21 is not making a comparable claim. It is making a smaller, testable one: that the structure of a film festival is a form of argument, and that argument can be made differently.

The measure worth watching is not what happens on the day. It is whether the cultural sector, after the credits roll, finds the access-first model too compelling to quietly set aside.