Event

Join us at Public Trust for The Missing Image: Senegalese Newsreels from 1966–1976, a film screening and panel discussion about restored newsreels from the archives of the first information service in independent Senegal, on Monday, March 17, 2025 from 6-8:00pm. This event will feature a screening of Les Actualités Senegalaises, followed by a public conversation with Professor Fatoumata Seck and archivists Marco Lena and Tiziana Manfredi. Presented in partnership with the Center for Experimental Ethnography and the Penn Cultural Heritage Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and with sponsorship from the Departments of Africana Studies, Cinema and Media Studies, and French and Francophone Studies.

Recovered in 2017 from the former Ministry of Information building in Dakar, Senegal, the four newsreels which will be screened in this program offer an unprecedented look at a critical period of artistic and political history in West Africa and the Caribbean through the legacy of the global Negritude movements and independent struggles of the 1960s. The films feature remarkable coverage of the first and second Black World Arts Festivals in Senegal and Nigeria, Senegalese independence ceremonial collaboration with Korea, and former Senegalese president and Negritude poet Léopold Sédar Senghor’s travels to the Caribbean (Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti) which feature his reunion with Aimé Césaire. This footage has only recently been made available through the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in collaboration with the Ministère de la Culture et du Patrimoine Historique de Sénégal – Direction du Cinéma.

Panel:

Tiziana Manfredi graduated in 2000 from the École des Beaux-Arts de Gênes, where she conducted research on “The art social role of traditional cultures of Western Africa”.  In 2003, Tiziana began traveling to Western Africa and decided to settle in Dakar. Her research, developed in different African countries, fills her images and video creations.

Marco Lena is an Italian researcher and digital restorer. He graduated in modern history with a thesis in cultural anthropology "Black identity and Afrocentrism" at the University of Genoa. He currently works in Senegal at the Direction de la cinématographie du Sénégal, for the restoration and valorization of Senegalese audiovisual archives.

Fatoumata Seck is an Assistant Professor of French and Italian and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature, at Stanford University. Seck specializes in the literatures and cultures of Africa and the African diaspora. Her book manuscript, Materializing Imaginaries in Postcolonial Senegal, offers a cultural history of the Senegalese left and examines its influence on African literature, cinema, and intellectual history.