Volunteers behind a Black-curated film programme say they feel disrespected and completely ignored by the British Film Institute (BFI) after major changes were made without consulting them, including axing its only paid staff member.
For almost 20 years, African Odysseys had been showcasing anti-racist and educational films and hosting important discussions on topics including Black British history to often sold-out audiences at the BFI of up to 450 people.
A group of Black community activists had already been successfully showing films at various London venues, including the London Museum Docklands and the London Museum for a number of years before the African Odysseys programme was established at the BFI in 2007.
The programme was co-founded by Tony Warner of Black History Walks and David Somerset, who had recently got a job at the BFI at the time. Over the years, the programme showed African diaspora content, celebrated African and Caribbean cinema and brought in a previously underserved Black audience to the venue.
“We had the 2pm slot on a Saturday – which is normally a dead cinema slot – but we made that slot into a popular slot for the Black community and we would regularly fill up 450 seats with our various content and speakers and discussions,” Tony tells the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS).
“We built up a huge audience there at the BFI, which is seen as a very white and middle class organisation.”
However things suddenly shifted last year, when the African Odysseys Steering Committee was told by the BFI that David’s role faced redundancy due to a “restructure” at the organisation.
Tony said: “We thought that is ridiculous, why would you do that? Why would you get rid of the only guy with all that experience and get rid of the job he does as well because in that case, how can African Odysseys continue?
“That was our perspective, we put it to them in writing. We said organisations can do what they want but in this case this is a unique programme, it’s very popular and is producing African Caribbean material that is not showing anywhere else – people love it and it’s making money for you.”
Despite the Committee’s pleas for there to be a formal consultation on the changes, David’s role was ultimately made redundant – much to the dismay of the volunteers who felt ignored and their views dismissed after dedicating so much of their free time to the programme and the BFI on weekends and throughout the years.
Tony says for three months, the Committee had tried to engage in talks with the BFI to set up a meeting, but this was ignored. When a meeting was eventually arranged with the Committee in January 2025 to discuss its concerns, Tony says this was cancelled two hours before it was supposed to take place.
Tony added: “As volunteers, we’ve worked out we put £6million of labour into that organisation, so how can they then look at us and say we need to cut this programme to save money when we are worth our expertise, marketing, consultancy and advertising – we did a lot to bring people to the BFI.”
Concerns over the loss of the programme were also raised in a petition – which has now been backed by more than 17,400 people and signed by various public figures, including actress, Anjoa Andoh and actor Rudolph Walker.
When the petition launched in October 2024, the Committee had called for the BFI to reverse its decision to prevent “a catastrophic loss of Black history archive”.
However, Tony says David’s role was officially dropped in January 2025, which was also when the last African Odysseys screening took place at the BFI.
When the LDRS got in touch with the BFI, a spokesperson referred to a March 2025 statement from its CEO, Ben Roberts.
Ben said: “We would like to reassure our African Odysseys audience that despite some internal staff reorganisation, we do not want this programme to end. However, African Odysseys is programmed in partnership with an external Steering Group, and we have not yet been able to agree on a shared approach to managing it.
“In the meantime, our in-house programmers, external advisers and partners continue to ensure that Black British, African and African diaspora stories are platformed and celebrated across the BFI’s public programme. We are very grateful to the dedication of the Steering Group who have partnered with us to deliver the programme over the years.”
He went on to say the BFI had reserved a space in its monthly programme for African Odysseys to return, however Tony and other volunteers had rejected the organisation’s response, stating it “showed no accountability” and hadn’t answered any of their concerns which had previously been raised.
Earlier this month, two mobile billboards which displayed the campaign drove around central London before parking outside BFI Southbank on the day of a film premiere to continue raising awareness on the experience of Committee members.
The Committee has also accused the BFI of failing to carry out a Race Equality Impact Assessment (REIA), which is used to examine how different racial groups will be impacted by a proposed change.
Volunteers argue a REIA should have been legally carried out before making the changes, particularly because of the way the programme had drawn in new Black audiences to the BFI, which is a publicly funded organisation and receives £20million in funding every year from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
Professor Gus John, a notable racial equality campaigner and educator whose work has featured in the programme, said: “You would have thought that after 17 years of promoting Black film and screening Black film to audiences of anything between one and 450, especially in a major cinema within the BFI, you would have thought after all of that, these people would of had at least the basic respect to want to engage with us and say, ‘okay, this is where we’re at, were having to make some management or financial decisions but let us see how that would impact upon the African Odysseys programme’.
“But they didn’t do that. Even when we said to them please conduct a REIA to see how the plans they want to make will impact this programme, they ignored us.”
Faisal Qureshi, a producer and researcher who filed a racial discrimination complaint against the BFI in 2021, said: “On one hand the BFI will say we really care about ethnic minorities, we really care about those under-represented communities but at the same time privately they treat them with a mix of condescension and contempt.”
As a result of his 2021 complaint, the BFI apologised to Faisal over the handling of his complaint.
Since February 2025, African Odysseys has held 14 screenings outside of the BFI at various London venues, which volunteers plan on continuing to do so independently.
Souleyman Garcia, a filmmaker whose own films have featured on the African Odysseys programme, said: “People come from all over, from Birmingham to Manchester and from Rugby to Nottingham to come and see and be a part of these events.
“It’s not a case that we can’t get audiences, it’s not a case that there’s not a hunger to see a different kind of storytelling across a demographic – there’s a platform for a different type of storytelling for wider audiences and it’s integral for these times.”
On Friday, November 7, the programme will be showcasing a free film screening and discussion on the experience of Black soldiers in World Wars at Curzon Goldsmiths in New Cross.
More information on the upcoming screening can be accessed here.
