Decolonising Through Co-Curation? Women Creators of the Future, Festival Films Femmes Afrique and Leeds International Film Festival

Amidst calls from Decolonise and Black Lives Matter movements, several film festivals are engaged in the beginnings of a “reorientation,” a shift in their understandings of, and relationships to, colonial power structures. Considering decoloniality as a plural process rather than a singular endpoint, this article examines a recent example of such reorientation: Women Creators of the Future is a programme of films made by women of African heritage, co-curated by Festival Films Femmes Afrique (Senegal) and Leeds International Film Festival (UK). Taking its inspiration from a previous Films Femmes Afrique programme of the same name, this initiative constitutes a meeting of festival “worlds” that tells us much about burgeoning processes of decolonisation in cultural organisations. Combining fieldwork with interviews and self-reflexive analysis, I trace the complex relationships between curation, funding, placemaking and labour that underpinned the collaboration. I argue that this meeting of two contrasting festivals illuminates emerging practices of decolonising through co-curation, yet also invites us to reflect on the need for practices that more fully address both epistemic and economic injustice