“Many stories from Nigeria have not been told yet”

Text: Gunda Achterhold

Abigail Mann is proud of her final project. Together with other students at Goethe University Frankfurt, the Nigerian filmed a documentary about cultural festivals in Jos. “We all come from different cultural backgrounds, yet we all share the same goal: to make good films in which we engage with our cultural heritage and give people a better understanding of our history.” The 32-year-old film studies graduate is one of the participants in the first Africa-wide Film Culture and Archival Studies master’s degree course that Goethe University has been jointly running with the University of Jos since 2019.

According to UNESCO statistics, India is the world’s most productive film nation. Each year, around a thousand feature films are produced, either in English or in one of the country’s three main languages: Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba. The objective of the master’s in Film Culture and Archival Studies is to train archive experts to analyse and preserve this rich cultural African heritage.

In Nigeria, Abigail Mann works for a media company as a producer and author. “I wanted to find out more about the cultural practices of filmmaking and learn how films can be preserved for future generations,” she explains. The importance of cataloguing and audiovisual archiving was already the subject of her final dissertation at the University of Jos. “I had read a lot about Ger­many and its extensive historical collections and was impressed.” During her semester as a visiting student, she visited museums and archives, including those of the degree programme’s two cooperation partners, the DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum in Frankfurt and Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin. At the same time, she also learnt a lot about filmmaking during the practice-oriented degree course: “It’s not enough to choose an interesting story, grab a camera and begin shooting. You have to know what the story needs and what added value it has for society.”

Besides scholarships that enable students to spend a semester at Goethe University in Frankfurt, like the grant Abigail Mann received, the DAAD-funded cooperation project also encompasses a train-the-trainer scholarship programme. This is specifically aimed at the academic and technical staff of the state-owned Nigerian Film Corporation, whose remit includes regulating the import and export of foreign and Nigerian films. The National Film, Video and Sound Archive (NFVSA) and the National Film Institute are both part of the Nigerian Film Corporation – and both work closely to­gether with the University of Jos. The train-the-trainer programme is designed to train people who will then be able to pass their knowledge on to others.

“It’s not enough to choose an interesting story, grab a camera and begin shooting. You have to know what the story needs and what added value it has for society.”

Film studies graduate Abigail Mann

One of these people is Janet Philip Adeshina, who has been working for the NFVSA in Jos for 15 years. She hopes the master’s programme will help her gain new knowledge and thus improve her work in digitisation, cataloguing and classification. The 49-year-old studied part-time while continuing to work and, along with a colleague, took part in a five-week training course at the Arsenal archive in Berlin in the summer of 2023. “We were part of the Arsenal team there and worked on Lebanese films,” she reports. As well as giving her practical experience in checking, repairing and scanning films, the training in Berlin also exposed her to new perspectives on international cinema. “Most of the films in our archive revolve primarily around Nigerian culture and black heritage.”

During a ten-day workshop in Jos in early 2024, Janet Philip Adeshina already took on the role of co-trainer: three experts from Arsenal came to Jos to train the master’s students and the National Film Archive staff. “That was a big success,” says Alo Paistik, who coordinates the cooperation programme at Goethe University Frankfurt. “The workshop topics covered almost the entire archiving chain, from archive administration and the careful handling of film material to the digitisation of films.” He also notes that the students taking the degree course in Jos were often very diverse, bringing with them a wide range of experiences of the film industry – as producers, authors or filmmakers. “It is therefore crucial to transfer archive-related knowledge to Jos.”

Abigail Mann would like to make films that focus on Nigeria in future. She mentions that the enthusiasm and interest her fellow students showed in the history of their own countries encouraged her to learn more about the history and culture of Nigeria. “Many stories from Nigeria have not been told yet,” she says, adding that the scholarship served as a platform for sharing ideas. “For me, the chance to document and archive cultural content, to restore and preserve it and make it digitally accessible, is the top priority.” —