Restitution and the Moving Image: Global Film Heritage Between Return, Access and Archival Reparation

As global demands grow for the restitution of looted artifacts from Western museums and ethnological collections, what about the displaced and sequestered moving-image heritage of the Global Majority? This book examines restitutive practices in audiovisual archives worldwide, addressing pressing practical questions with immediate policy implications. It explores legal frameworks, codes of conduct, and institutional governance while offering a groundbreaking theoretical contribution to film and heritage studies. If calls for restitution challenge traditional film archival practices, film itself—used as an archival medium—complicates conventional notions of restitution. Moving beyond a limited view of restitution as simply “giving back,” the contributors to this volume envision a broader, decolonial horizon. They reassert historical demands for decolonial worldmaking that remain unfulfilled, proposing new political and ethical relationships between the unequal stakeholders of global film heritage. This book is an essential resource for scholars in film and media history, feminist and decolonial theory, critical geography, and archival studies, as well as for curators, archivists, cultural practitioners, and general readers. It offers a vital perspective for anyone engaged in the ongoing work of decolonizing audiovisual archives.