ABSTRACT
For many African film scholars, accessing colonial film archives remains a daunting challenge, as much film material is either locked in inaccessible formats or held in repositories outside the nation-state. This chapter by film scholar Rebecca Ohene-Asah turns to the online database Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire to interrogate questions of access: to the digitized films themselves, to their value as shared cultural heritage, and to the metadata that frames them in relation to Ghanaian (film) history. Through an examination of key films alongside critical texts from scholars connected to the UK-based research project that created the database, the chapter contributes to ongoing debates on access to colonial film heritage and amplifies attendant calls for its “decolonization” and “restitution” from the perspective of African film scholarship.
