Symposium Panel 1: The UNREST Project: Restitution Dreaming as a Decolonial Practice

This panel presents early findings from the transnational research and archival project Unhousing Restitution (UNREST). Since early 2026, archival and film-cultural partners from Sudan, Egypt, Ghana, Germany, the US and UK have worked with three UK-based universities to develop practices of audiovisual heritage restitution whose founding terms are defined by south-based cultural, educational and archival entities. UNREST centres two African collections stranded for years in European archives. The scattered archive of Sudanese artist-filmmaker Hussein Shariffe was rescued by family and friends following Shariffe’s death in Cairo exile in 2005. Shariffe’s paper archive is held in London; what remains of his original film material is currently housed at Arsenal’s film archive. UNREST’s second focus is the Hesse Collection: 50 films from a Ghana Film Industry Corporation collection held for decades in limbo in London’s Iron Mountain bonded warehouse. UNREST works to repatriate both collections while centring a decolonial ethics of social justice, south-based agency, and collective care and repair. Anchoring that ethical framework is a practice we term practical dreaming: a collective conversation that builds future cinematic worlds by imagining shared horizons for archival recovery, repair and recirculation. Panel participants will present reflections on these emergent utopias, detailing work to date across the UNREST network on collaborative archive practice, infrastructure and capacity building, shared knowledge production, and reclaimed histories and memories as resources for reimagined worlds.

Erica Carter is Professor of Film at King’s College London, a Fellow of the British Academy, a Trustee of the Hussein Shariffe Foundation, and Principal Investigator of UNREST. Her publications include the co-authored Mapping the Sensible: Distribution, Inscription, Cinematic Thinking (2022), Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory (2010), and the BFI German Cinema Book (2021). Her current research centers on colonial cinema, decolonial archive practice, and archives and audiovisual heritage in Ghana and Sudan. Carter is a member of the Hussein Shariffe Creative Collective.

Tamer El Said is a filmmaker and producer living between Berlin and Cairo. His filmography includes 17 films that have received many local and international awards. Tamer founded Zero Production in 2007 to produce independent films. He is a founder and the joint Artistic Director of Cimatheque – Alternative Film Centre in Cairo, Co-Director of the archive-based interdisciplinary project Rewind Forward, and an UNREST cultural partner.

Eiman Hussein is an independent researcher, therapist, educator, archivist, and poet. The daughter of Sudanese multidisciplinary artist Hussein Shariffe, she launched the Hussein Shariffe Foundation, co-founded the Shariffe Creative Collective, and works as Research Associate at King’s College London to preserve, digitize, and recirculate her father’s archive. Hussein researches archives as living spaces of artistic practice and cultural memory, exploring issues of ethical access in contexts of mobility, displacement, Black identity, colonial history, and archival loss.

Judith Opoku-Boateng is Head of the University of Ghana Archives, researcher, and audiovisual heritage specialist. Grounded in a Pan-African vision, her work spans film and sound preservation, heritage collections, community archiving, restitution, and creative access. A former IASA Vice President, GAVA Advisory Board member, and UNESCO Memory of the World National Committee member, she contributes to global archival discourse through major projects, publications, keynotes, and presentations.