Curator, writer and programmer June Givanni, founder of the June Givanni Pan-African Archive (JGPACA), will receive the BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) Award for Best British Contribution to Cinema at the EE BAFTA Film Awards in February.
Based in London, JGPACA is a volunteer-run archive founded and amassed by June Givanni over 40 years as part of her wider curatorial work and is dedicated to preserving the history of pan-African and black British cinema and culture. It includes more than 10,000 rare and unique artefacts documenting the development of cinema in Africa and the African diaspora, including in Britain, which would not otherwise have been preserved – and has grown into one of the UK’s largest independent archives.
Items from June Givanni’s Pan-African Film Archive have also formed the basis of public screenings – most recently at Raven Row in East London.
June Givanni was born in what was then British Guiana and moved to the UK at the age of seven. She began her career bringing the first Third World Film Festival to Third Eye London, before working as a film programmer in the ethnic minorities’ unit of the Greater London Council. She went on to run the BFI’s Afro-Caribbean unit and compiled the first comprehensive directory of black and Asian films in the UK, as well as co-editing the BFI’s Black Film Bulletin, which was relaunched in 2021 as a quarterly collaboration with Sight and Sound magazine.
She has curated films on five continents and her published books include Remote Control: Dilemmas of Black Intervention in British Film and TV and Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image.
