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Johannesburg Hosts Inaugural Resonance Archive Festival
28 August 2025 @ 11:00 am – 1 September 2025 @ 12:00 am
Johannesburg is set to become a hub for memory, storytelling, and cultural resistance as it hosts the inaugural Resonance Archive Festival from 27–31 August 2025. Presented by Anaphora Films in collaboration with The South African Festival of Memory, this groundbreaking festival offers a platform to explore archives as sites of political resistance, historical reckoning, and cultural identity.
The 2025 theme, “The Pulse of Memory, The Power of Story,” guides a multidisciplinary programme featuring rare archival screenings, contemporary documentaries, symposiums, sonic lectures, exhibitions, and community activations. Festival venues span seven iconic locations across Johannesburg, including The Bioscope, Eyethu Heritage Hall in Soweto, The Forge, The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember, Untitled Basement, Ster-Kinekor Cinema Nouveau Rosebank, and The Market Photo Workshop.
Festival Highlights Include:
- How Long (1976) — Gibson Kente’s only film, banned under apartheid, screening publicly for the first time in 49 years.
- Siliva the Zulu (1927) & The 37th Bride (1953) — reclaiming early African cinema narratives long overshadowed by colonial perspectives.
- Ernest Cole: Lost and Found — Raoul Peck’s portrait of the iconic photographer who exposed apartheid’s brutality.
- Soundtrack to a Coup d’État — a Sundance-winning exploration of jazz, Cold War politics, and African liberation.
- Sam Nzima: A Journey Through His Lens — a decade-long project tracing the story behind one of South Africa’s most significant photographs.
Beyond screenings, the Revisiting Memory Symposium brings together scholars, artists, and cultural practitioners such as Zikhona Valela, Dr. Candice Jansen, Dr. Litheko Modisane, Arya Lalloo, and Catherine Meyburgh to examine social and political theories in archives and the ethics of custodianship. The Sonic Symposium explores sound as memory, with performances and contributions from Kamazu, Tumi Mogorosi & Gabi Motuba, Mamthug, Mxolisi Makhubo, and Atiyyah Khan.
“The Resonance Archive Festival is not about nostalgia. It is about reclaiming narrative agency, confronting historical silences, and asserting that memory is an active, contested terrain. We are here to ask what gets preserved, who decides, and how those choices shape our futures.”
Festival Director Sifiso Khanyile emphasizes:
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