‘Project a Black Planet’: how the Barbican is screening the archive of pan-Africanism

On 14 July 2026 the Barbican Centre in London opened Project a Black Planet: Film, a season of screenings programmed to treat pan-Africanism as a working political project rather than a closed chapter. The lineup spans feature films, shorts and newsreel fragments drawn from the late colonial and early independence decades, and it arrives at a moment when European cultural institutions are visibly renegotiating which twentieth-century archives they choose to project, and on whose terms.

What the season proposes is not nostalgia but triage. Pan-Africanism, as the films on the bill remember it, was an act of solidarity, resistance and fierce creativity stitched together across Algiers, Accra, Conakry, Dar es Salaam, Paris, Havana and London. Programming it as such, rather than as a mood board of black cultural achievement, is the editorial choice that gives the season its edge, and it is that choice, more than any individual title, that the rest of the European film calendar will now have to answer for.

What the bill actually argues

The strongest reading of the season is that pan-Africanism was a cinema before it was a canon. The programme pairs well-known works with harder-to-see material: liberation-era newsreels that travelled from one newly independent capital to the next, fiction features that borrowed Soviet and Cuban production muscle when Western co-production money was closed, and short documentaries produced inside diaspora networks in London and Paris. The point the curators are making, with the running order and not with a wall text, is that the movement built its own image economy because the existing one would not carry the story.

That argument lands harder because the films are shown together rather than in isolation. A Francophone independence-era feature shown beside a Lusophone liberation short beside a Caribbean diaspora essay film lets the viewer see the common grammar: a refusal of the colonial gaze, a willingness to use the camera as a planning document for the post-colonial state, and a habit of solidarity that ran ahead of any single national government. The season treats this as evidence, not affect.

A counter-narrative the bill makes room for

Pan-Africanism has always had a more awkward second story, and the season does not flinch from it. The political project imagined by figures from Accra to Algiers was also a project of states, and states failed, were overthrown, or were captured. Films that register the authoritarian drift inside some post-independence governments sit alongside the liberation footage rather than being quarantined from it. The result is a programme that refuses the easy version of the archive, in which every film is a rallying cry and every city is a capital of the future.

This matters because European retrospectives of African political movements have often reached for the safer version. Showing the dissent within the movement, on the same screen, at the same hour, is what distinguishes a season that takes the archive seriously from one that takes it home.

The structural frame, in plain terms

What the season sits inside is a wider renegotiation of who controls the projection of twentieth-century political movements inside European cultural institutions. For most of the post-1989 period, the default was a curated African cinema that travelled through festival circuits and was framed, in Western programme notes, almost entirely as art. Politics arrived in the films but stopped at the door of the blurb. A season that bills pan-Africanism as an act of solidarity, resistance and fierce creativity is rejecting that older arrangement. The frame of art-only was never neutral; it quietly moved the political content of the films off the page and into the auditorium, where a viewer could admire the cinematography without having to argue with the project.

The Barbican's choice to title the season Project a Black Planet is doing some of that work in plain English. The verb is forward-leaning. The aim is a planet, not a population. That is a programme note, but it is also a posture, and it sets a benchmark for the rest of the European institutional calendar.

What is at stake for the rest of the season

The stakes are immediate and concrete. Two institutions to watch: the BFI, whose own African and Caribbean diaspora programming has tended to be retrospective and festival-shaped, and the larger European festival circuit that will receive the touring version of this programme. If the season travels as designed, with its political claims intact and its lesser-seen material restored, it forces a rewrite of how pan-African cinema is framed in European marketing copy. If it travels as a clipped highlights reel, the political argument dissolves on the road and the season becomes a mood.

For London specifically, the season lands alongside an ongoing argument about whose stories the capital's publicly funded venues programme, and on whose authority. The Barbican has put its weight behind a politically explicit reading of a movement that most European institutions have preferred to keep at arm's length. The risk is that the season reads as a one-off curatorial flourish. The opportunity is that it sets a precedent the rest of the calendar will now have to either meet or visibly fall short of.

Where the sources thin

What remains uncertain is how the season will be received inside the African film press and inside the diasporic critical infrastructure that the films themselves once helped to build. Western programme notes have spent four decades telling pan-African cinema what it meant; the more interesting test is whether the curators have left enough room on the page for the filmmakers and their inheritors to argue back. On the evidence of the lineup, that room exists. Whether it survives the touring schedule is a question the next six months will answer.

Desk note: this article treats the Barbican season as a curatorial and editorial event, not as a film review. Monexus frames the season against the wider European institutional pattern of programming African political cinema, and reads the political claims of the programme as the primary subject.