June Givanni-Cedar Herald Index

June Givanni is a Guyanese-born London-based film curator. She has specialized in African-related movies since 1985, and has worked internationally as a film and television programme consultant and writer. She is also a member of the Africa Movie Academy Award jury.

Background

June Ingrid Givanni was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and grew up in the UK.

June Givanni

She was co-ordinator of the Greater London Council's Third Eye Film Festival in 1983, and during the 1980s was active in working for the creation of specialist distribution circuits for the work of black and Third World filmmakers. At the British Film Institute (BFI) she created and was responsible for managing the African Caribbean Unit, and she compiled the first comprehensive directory of black and Asian films in the UK, as well as starting with Gaylene Gould the BFI's Black Film Bulletin (1993–96). Givanni has worked with various international film festivals programming African and African diaspora films as a guest curator, including at the São Paulo Short Film Festival in Brazil, the Kerala International Film Festival in India, Images Caraibes in Martinique, Creteil Film Festival, in Paris. Givanni has served on film juries at African film festivals such as FESPACO (from 1985), Zanzibar Festival of the Dhow Countries, the All Africa Film Awards in South Africa, the JCCarthage and others.

June Givanni

Her publications include the edited volumes Remote Control: Dilemmas of Black Intervention in British Film and TV (1996) and Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image (2001).

June Givanni

She runs the June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive (JGPACA) in London, a personal collection of films, ephemera, manuscripts, publications, audio, photography, posters documenting pan-African cinema, in residence at MayDay Rooms (as of 2017). As Maya Jaggi writes in The Financial Times: "PerAnkh, an 'Egyptian term for a place of learning and memory', is how June Givanni sees her personal archive, now one of the world’s most important collections documenting the moving image for the African continent and its diaspora. Based in central London's MayDay Rooms, dedicated to 'history from below', the June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive ranges from rare videos and audio interviews to film and festival posters, screenplays and transcripts, snapshots and stills. It forms an alternative history of the past six decades of film-making with Africa at its heart."

In 2018, Givanni was awarded an honorary doctorate by SOAS, University of London.

In 2023, Raven Row hosted the exhibition PerAnkh: The June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive, on display from 15 April to 4 June. As the reviewer for Time Out said, "You’d have to move in for a month to even scratch the surface of what’s on display." Leila Latif stated in The Guardian: "The exhibition forms an alternative history, acknowledging the vitality and ingenuity that are under-appreciated or studiously ignored by so many. And the value of physical films and objects is beyond just what they depict. ...While Givanni has always been at the forefront of the decolonisation of culture, engaging with the archive invites you to join her there."

Selected published works

Black/Asian film & video list (BFI Education 1988) Remote Control: Dilemmas of Black Intervention in British Film and TV (BFI Publishing, 1996; Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image (BFI, 2001;