The former Nigerian Film Unit building was one of the first self-directed outposts of the British visual propaganda engine, the Colonial Film Unit, stands empty on Ikoyi Road, Lagos, in the shadow of today’s Nigerian Film Corporation building. The rooms are full of dust, cobwebs, stopped clocks, and rusty and rotting celluloid film cans. Amongst these cans, a long-lost classic of Nigerian filmmaking, Shehu Umar (1976) was found in 2015. The films housed in this building are hard to see because of their condition, but also perhaps because people do not want to see them. They reveal a colonial residue, that is echoed in walls of the building itself.
Taking its title from the 2018 Juliette Singh book, No Archive Can Restore You depicts the spatial configuration of this colonial archive, which lies just out of view, in the heart of the Lagosian cityscape. Despite its invisibility, it contains purulent images that we cannot, will not, or choose not to see. The film imagines ‘lost’ films from the archive in distinctive soundscapes, juxtaposed with images of the abandoned interior and exteriors of the building. This is an exploration into the ‘sonic shadows’ that colonial moving images continue to generate.
CREW:
Director: Onyeka Igwe
Producer: Omowunmi Ogundipe
Cinematographer: Morgan K. Spencer
Sound: Richy Carey
Director
Onyeka Igwe
Onyeka Igwe is an artist and researcher working between cinema and installation. She is born and based in London, UK. In her non-fiction video work Onyeka uses dance, voice, archives, sound design and text to create structural ‘figure-of-eights’, a format that exposes a multiplicity of narratives.
The work comprises of untieable strands and threads, anchored by a rhythmic editing style, as well as close attention to the dissonance, reflection and amplification that occurs between image and sound; in the work as much in life, what is said and what we see are not always the same thing.Selected Filmography
A Radical Duet (2023), No Archive Can Restore You (2020) 
