In Focus: Onyeka Igwe 1

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No Archive Can Restore You
Onyeka Igwe | 2020 | UK | 5’ | digital | English Spoken

No Archive Can Restore You presents a study of the former site of the Nigerian Film Unit as it lies abandoned on Ikoyi Road in Lagos. Images of the empty, dust filled space, complete with abandoned equipment and film canisters, are re-inhabited through a sonic score that acts to imagine lost films from the archive. Colonial residues are reenacted through these sonic ghosts. The location becomes transformed through Igwe’s situated presence to allow for forgotten and hidden meanings to emerge from this building loaded with the weight of Britain’s colonial history.

“The University of Ibadan is an example of the university as a colonial project, one that sets the standard of success, of living the good life – the ‘civilised’ life. It was created in 1948 in southwestern Nigeria to produce docile and compliant colonial subjects, there to serve the interests of the imperial core. Post national independence, it flourished – offering a new image conjugated by Nigerian thought and culture for a brief and bright moment. But then war came, British funding was withdrawn, and Nigeria’s economic independence was funnelled into Western mandated streams, draining the university of its promise. Now it has become something of a shadow of its former self, from the ‘Good old days to harsh reality’. And at the same time, it is also the protagonist in a real-life fairytale of social mobility that provides many, including my mother, the opportunity to assert an identity in contradiction to a predestined path. Allowing for self-possession, mobility, independence and new horizons.” (Onyeka Igwe)

The Miracle on George Green
Onyeka Igwe | 2022 | UK | 12’ | digital | English spoken

The Miracle on George Green takes as its focus a campaign to save an old Chestnut tree in Wanstead under threat due to the construction of the M11 link road in the early 1990s. The protests received national attention as environmental activists travelled from around the UK to join local groups as they fought to prevent the building of the road and preserve the area’s landscape and heritage. The campaign gained notoriety for both its scale and ambition as lawyers famously managed to establish the status of a legal dwelling for a treehouse constructed in the boughs of the oak tree. Drawing on a range of archival materials, including community videos made during the campaign, Igwe’s film expands outward through other social collective sites to tell a collective social history of the UK tradition of the commons.

Ungentle
Onyeka Igwe & Huw Lemmey | 2022 | UK | 36’ | digital | English spoken

Made in collaboration with Huw Lemmey, Ungentle examines the entangled histories of British intelligence and male homosexuality. Grounded in archival research yet shaped by fiction, the film is narrated by an imagined figure: a mid-20th-century spy whose experience of queerness, secrecy, power and empire destabilises any fixed sense of truth.

Shot on 16mm, Ungentle moves through several charged British sites and landscapes, from St James’s Park – long associated with cruising and other clandestine encounters at the heart of state power – to Beaulieu, once a Special Operations Executive training ground. Drawing on the lives of figures such as Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Denis Rake, Noël Coward and Hardy Amies, the film engages and unsettles the visual and literary conventions of the British spy genre, tracing the overlapping psychologies of espionage and queer life through desire, loyalty and disguise.

Followed by a Q&A with Onyeka Igwe.