20 years of African Odysseys: Is @BFI right to ignore 18,400 people ?

BFI broke its promise to the monthly. popular, anti-racist, Black history film series and cancelled it while ignoring 18,400 people. Why?

This event recognises 20 years of the African Odysseys monthly film programme, formerly at the British Film Institute, and 61 years of the first Race Relations Act

African Odysseys runs events least once a month since 2007 but often has multiple screenings/seasons like Ousmane Sembene, Horace Ove, Raoul Peck and Black and Banned. It also hosts talks and workshops on topics like Black Cowboys, the Harlem Renaissance, deaths in custody, African Spirituality, Aboriginal civil rights, Kenyan concentration camps and classical composers.

This presentation will go through some of the greatest achievements the volunteer-curated African Odysseys film/Q&A series made since 2007. These include

• Championing Ava Duvernays’ films when mainstream cinemas were not interested in films by Black women
• Showcasing the works of Menelik Shabbaz after years of British Film Institute refusing his films
• Spotlighting Black deaths in custody and giving the families a national stage
• Training young filmmakers with courses subsidised by Black Hollywood
• Creating safe spaces at very white institutions that were not used to crowds of Black people
• Giving opportunities to thousands of Black directors/producers/actors that are excluded by mainstream medias ‘old boy networks’ and glass ceilings
• Promoting African/Caribbean history all year long
• Regularly filling up the British Film Institute’s 450 seater at 2pm on a Saturday for two decades, a known ‘dead’ slot in cinema culture
• Giving £6 million worth of consultancy/labour to the @BFI charity
• The link between national Windrush Day and African Odysseys

and much more. This is an online event check junk mail for link 24 hours before start

A short background to BFI’s shock cancellation of African Odysseys with no consultation while ignoring the 2010 Public Sector Equality laws and the opinion of over 25 academic experts and repeatedly refusing to meet with Professor Gus John or the volunteer curators who put £6 million of work into the BFI

The facts are that Stuart Brown, Head of Programme and Acquisitions at he BFI had agreed to a 20 year anniversary season of African Odysseys films for 2026 at a face- to-face-sit-down-and-shake-hands-meeting with AO Steering Committee members on August 29th 2023 at BFI Southbank.

Brown had also agreed to include over 100 African Odysseys titles to the online BFI iPlayer and make it reflect the decades of AO films, address the exclusion of AO from the BFI magazine, Sight and Sound edited by Mike Williams, and provide more resources for the sole staff member responsible for African Odysseys, David Somerset, who was acknowledged to be overworked even in 2023.

That meeting was part of the ongoing series of complaints against discrimination at the BFI that were presented in writing since June 2020 to BFI CEO Ben Roberts by the African Odysseys volunteer Steering Committee

In January 2025 the BFI made Somerset, the co-founder of African Odysseys and the only BFI staff member responsible for the programme, redundant; and on top of that, deleted his post entirely meaning the work could not continue. This cancelled African Odysseys despite 18,400 people writing in to support and in flagrant breach of the 2023 agreement and without doing a legally required Race Equality Impact Assessment which had been agreed at an online meeting with Stuart Brown and Director of Inclusion Melanie Hoyes on 2nd July 2024

The BFI have also refused to answer these 8 simple questions for two years whilst boasting about their ‘transparency’ and desire to ‘work with the global majority’ HERE

BFI have been involved in three further race scandals since 2023 involving Faisal Querishi, Tariq Ali and Professor Clive Nwonka HERE

African Odysseys continues to show films monthly at grassroots venues across the capital details HERE