Emblematic Elusions | Film Screening & Lecture with Afi Venessa Appiah

Please join us for a screening of La Noire de... / Black Girl (Ousmane Sembène, 1966) and an accompanying lecture by Africanist film theorist Afi Venessa Appiah at Emily Carr University's Reliance Theatre.

Taking the example of Ousmane Sembène, Appiah will examine how African cinema's early directors infused their work with anti-colonial and Pan-Africanist ideals whilst remaining entangled in ex-colonial support systems which imposed creative restrictions. France's Bureau du Cinéma exemplified this paradox, offering resources while reinforcing dependency. Through strategies like Sembène's "mégotage"—making films with minimal means—African filmmakers turned constraint into innovation, revealing cinema's role in both resisting and reflecting the enduring erotics of the postcolony.

Appiah's lecture is based on the first edition of her Emblematic Elusions chapbook series, which details how filmmakers have redefined the form of the Black woman in the visual field from the wounded signifier to an embodied vessel for liberation. A focus on the question of Eros in African cinema allows for an intuitive opening for larger discourses of the erotics of history, [post]colonialism, migration and diaspora, socio-economic dynamics and [post]nationalism. African auteurs have [re]positioned the nude Black female form from a wounded canvas to challenging, exposing, sensitizing, and healing the qualms of the African societies represented within these films.

Copies of all three editions of Emblematic Elusions will be available for purchase from READ Books.

This event is co-presented by gallery gachet and Libby Leshgold Gallery on the occasion of Prelude……Venus Lives!, an exhibition of public art by Afi Venessa Appiah, Kariyana Calloway-Scott, and Praise Etiosa Godswill, curated by Moroti George.

About the Speakers

Afi Venessa Appiah is a theorist, editor, and publisher specializing in African Studies, Film Studies, and Visual Culture. She holds a Master of Arts in Film Studies with a specialization in African Studies, as well as a double Bachelor of Arts in both disciplines. Her contemplative approach finds objective significance in the realms of the intangible, complex, and taboo. Afi is also the editor at Anteism Books and co-founder of the afila.si (æfilæsi) collective digital library.

Her thesis, Within Double Restraint: the Aesthetics & Dialectics of Eroticism in Sub-Saharan Cinema, contributes to academic, cultural, and artistic dialogue, pioneering a new field in African cinematic theory. Combining her academic research with experience in independent publishing and curation, she developed Emblematic Elusions: Eros in African Cinema, an educational chapbook series that utilizes the alluring potential of art book design to present essays on film to encourage social, economic, and political discourse. This series is now available in bookstores and institutions across North America and is distributed by European distributor Antenne Books.

Olumoroti (Moroti) Soji-George (he/they) is a curator, writer, and educator based in Vancouver, BC. He currently serves as the Director/Curator of Gallery Gachet and the Curator at the Black Arts Centre in Surrey. His practice is rooted in exploring how Blackness is embodied, coded, and represented across visual culture and shared social landscapes. Guided by a belief in the radical possibilities of space, Moroti envisions community-centered art environments that honour lived experience and expand who is seen, heard, and valued in cultural discourse. Through curatorial research grounded in language, archival engagement, and lens-based work, his approach reflects a commitment to non-hierarchical knowledge production. He is particularly invested in the ways contemporary Black artists shape new cultural and ontological imaginaries that challenge dominant Western frameworks.