Jali Film Weekender: The Jali Collective is Creating Space for African Cinema in Edinburgh

In 2025, Tomiwa Folorunso, Isabel Moura Mendes, and Carmen Thompson founded The Jali Collective and Jali Film Weekender. The former is an Edinburgh-based grassroots collective that widens access to African cinema, celebrates, and elevates Black, African, and diaspora stories through film and culture. They achieved this motive through the Jali Film Weekender, which launched its first edition in 2025. Now in its second year, the festival is keen on centering Black, African, and diaspora audiences in Scotland through its curated films, conversations, and festival. 

Ahead of the festival, Culture Custodian spoke with Folorunso, Mendes, and Thompson about the festival, its programming of African cinema, and future plans for longevity and distribution. 

This interview has been edited for clarity. 

Jali Collective and Jali Film Weekender launched in 2025. Individually, what led you to its creation? And, what was the actual spark that made the three of you decide to build this rather than pitch into an existing festival?

Carmen: We had all been working individually in film, arts, and culture for a long time, and we all live in Edinburgh. We were getting frustrated with how little work was being done in this area, but as people living in the city, we also wanted to watch and engage with Black, African and diaspora film and art. We just did not have enough opportunities to do that. So, we felt that absence both within the industry and as audiences. At one point, we were all feeling the same thing and, crucially, had the energy to do something about it. 

When you work freelance, you can feel an absence very strongly but still not have the capacity to respond to it. Coming together meant we could share the work and build something collaborative, community-based and rooted in the city. We had also all tried, in different ways, to make space for this work within existing institutions and organisations. Often, when those institutions did engage with it, it felt tokenistic or one-off before things went back to how they were. We were tired of fighting to make space within somebody else’s structure. We wanted to build our own, with care and longevity, that could occupy space in Edinburgh consistently.

Isabel: For me, the timing matters too. We started in 2025, after COVID and the period when cultural life had contracted so sharply. Before that, I worked with Africa in Motion, spent around six years working with Film Africa in London, and later did more film work through the British Council. I then moved more into theatre and dance. Because I live in Edinburgh, I was very aware of the independent initiatives that Carmen, Tomiwa and others were already running, and that gave me hope. One difficult consequence of COVID was that some of those independent initiatives disappeared. Work that is already at the margins is often the first to fall away because it is hard to sustain even in normal circumstances. Coming out of that period, I remember asking Carmen to have coffee and thinking: is there something we can do collectively, with more shared energy, that feels almost impossible to carry individually? We all had jobs and the practical need to make a living, but we also had a real commitment to this work. The collective made it possible to act on that commitment together.

Tomiwa: I was travelling to film festivals, watching films, hearing filmmakers speak about their work, and having these heart-filling encounters, both as an audience member and as part of my work, but always out of home. Although, as Isabel and Carmen have mentioned, we had tried to create similar moments in Edinburgh and Scotland, they were always just moments that were infrequent, under-resourced, and forced to fit into existing structures with limited flexibility. For any work that engages audiences, or reaches Black and African communities, it’s non-negotiable for me–and now for us as Jali–that intention, care, and authenticity are part of its foundation. It was also about creating space for people to come together, and for the work of Black, African and diaspora filmmakers and artists to be seen. Simple. From the beginning, we have been very conscious that this wasn’t about us as individuals. We saw space for something like Jali and the Weekender, and we had the energy. So we ran with that–and still are–and I’m so happy we did because it has been unimaginable in all the best ways. 

You each came in with different strands of experience in Scotland’s film and arts sectors. How did the three of you actually find each other, and how did you divide up who does what?

Carmen: It is a very small circle, not only in Scotland but in the UK more broadly and, in some ways, internationally. When you do this kind of work and you share the same priorities and interests, you find each other. What I really love about the Scottish arts industry, especially within Black, African and diaspora artist and creative communities, is that it is very close-knit, collaborative and not particularly hierarchical. We all knew of each other through those circles for a while, so bringing the work together felt quite natural. Tomiwa and I had both been running small community film-clubs independently in Edinburgh, and Isabel and I connected over coffee. As for who does what, we have tried to think deliberately about what it means to work genuinely collectively. We put it in our name, so we want our work to live up to it. When we established Jali, we wrote a guiding constitution about how we wanted to work and make decisions. The big decisions-how the Weekender is positioned, what the core elements are and what we want the programme to do-are made together, and we need to be fully aligned before we move forward. Practically, it makes sense to divide some of the logistical work according to our experience. I lead on programming because that is also part of my work outside Jali, but creatively we all decide what goes into the programme. Isabel leads on sponsorships and partnerships. Tomiwa leads on production and outreach, including the work with our cultural advisors. We each lead on areas, but we are constantly in dialogue, and there is a lot of overlap.

The programming features African-based and diaspora-based filmmakers. How much of the programming was continental African work versus diaspora work, and was that ratio a conscious choice?

Carmen: We do not work to a fixed ratio between work from the African continent and work from the diaspora. The difficulty is that those categories are hard to define. Even ‘African cinema’ can mean different things depending on whether you define it by the filmmaker, where the funding came from, what is on screen, or some combination of those things. Filmmakers and creative networks are also incredibly mobile, so the boundaries are porous. There is intentionality in the broader remit of Jali, but there is not a calculation where we decide that a certain percentage must come from the continent and a certain percentage from the diaspora. We look at the work first: what speaks to us, and what speaks to the themes and ideas we want to bring to audiences. Our programme has included work from the African continent, the global diaspora, the Caribbean and beyond. We have deliberately set ourselves a broad remit because we do not want audiences to come away with a narrow definition of what this cinema is or where it comes from.

There’s a growing presence of Africans in Scotland and the Filmhouse’s (which centers art house cinema)recent reopening makes choosing Edinburgh the festival’s location strategic. As the founders, why Edinburgh, and what gap in the curation of African and African-adjacent titles in the  UK/Scottish festival landscape were you trying to fill? 

Tomiwa: All three of us live and work here, so it made sense to build something in a city we know well. We understand the landscape, we know people here and we can see what is missing. Edinburgh is also well known for festivals, I grew up in this city and have been incredibly lucky to have been immersed in the cultural and arts scene since I can remember, but it’s also been lonely, in obvious and subtle ways. So I have always found it interesting to ask: who is not in this room? How are they being served, and how are they part of the festival landscape? How are they part of the cultural landscape of this city, and by extension, the country?

Isabel: Edinburgh has an international festival ecosystem that is multidisciplinary and cross-arts, but the way ‘international’ is understood is not always all-encompassing. Certain, more Western regions of the world are often privileged, which means not all voices are heard or given the same space. In my other work in theatre and dance, I constantly look for expressions of my own heritage and my own existence as a contemporary human being in public art, and that is something I still find lacking. So for us there is a gap in what gets platformed in a major festival city, but also in how Edinburgh audiences themselves are catered for.

Jali Collective: On the idea that there is a growing African population in Scotland, we would be cautious about making that claim without the data. There may be increased visibility, but we would not want to state confidently that the population itself is growing unless we had the evidence for it.

Tomiwa Folorunso

The festival centers African cinema and filmmakers. From a distribution and curation standpoint, how important do you think the Film Weekender is to these filmmakers and the African film ecosystem?

Carmen: I also work in distribution and programming outside Jali, and there is a very active conversation happening internationally about the distribution and audience-building of African and diaspora cinema. So much exciting, ambitious, and formally inventive work is being made, but there is often a disconnect between that work and the audiences who might respond to it. I see Jali as one small part of a much wider ecosystem of people trying to close that gap. I do not think there is one global solution. I believe the answer to audience development is to do it locally: build meaningful audiences where you are, understand those audiences, and create opportunities for the work to meet them. Then, as Jali grows, we hope to connect with other organisations doing similar work elsewhere, work out how we can support and amplify each other, and contribute in a small way to a stronger distribution and exhibition ecosystem for African and diaspora cinema.

Is there any ambition to move beyond a one-off annual exhibition slot into something with more distribution muscle — a touring programme, a partnership with a streamer or a UK distributor, rights advocacy for the filmmakers you platform — or is that explicitly outside what Jali Collective wants to be?

Jali Collective: Never say never. We are only in our second year, and the Weekender has already grown by a day, which feels both significant and really exciting. At this stage, a big part of the work is simply getting the Weekender right. At the same time, we want to stay very responsive to what audiences need and where the gaps are. That might eventually mean distribution activity. It might mean taking the Weekender programme on tour so people elsewhere in Scotland have access to the programme. It could mean other kinds of partnerships. We do not want to force Jali into a fixed expansion plan too early. We want to stay flexible and let future activity grow out of audience need, genuine opportunity, and what we have the capacity to do.

Isabel Moura Mendes

Are there conversations happening with any of the filmmakers you’ve platformed about longer-term relationships — repeat programming, possible distribution deals, informal advocacy — or does the relationship mostly end when the credits roll and the Q&A wraps?

Isabel: We definitely want those relationships to continue beyond a single screening. One example from the first Weekender was Khartoum, a documentary about Sudan. We invited producer Talal Afifi, who is based in Ireland, to attend, and that has led to ongoing conversations about possible future collaboration with the wider collective of Sudanese filmmakers connected to the project. The audience response matters as well. It helps guide us in thinking about what work we do next. We are interested in following the filmmakers we work with, seeing what they make next and finding ways to support that work as their careers develop. The main limitation is capacity. Everything we do is underpinned by funding, so we rely on public funding alongside sponsorship and support from trusts and foundations. We can imagine so many things to do with filmmakers; what determines whether we can deliver them is often the resources available to us.

Carmen: Through my other work, I get to travel to festivals, and it has already been exciting to meet filmmakers and industry people who have heard of Jali. We want people to think of us when they have work that fits the programme – filmmakers themselves, but also distributors and sales agents. We also want people to think beyond London. Many European or North American distributors and sales agents think about a UK premiere and immediately think of London, without necessarily having a wider UK strategy. Scotland is its own region, with its own audiences. We want Jali to be a recognised point in the calendar where this work can be platformed and where filmmakers can have a meaningful Scottish premiere.

Carmen Thompson

For audience growth, how are you thinking about accessibility(ticket pricing, free events) and marketing in terms of reaching people who don’t already move in film-festival circles?

Jali Collective: We work directly with community groups and organisations to support audiences accessing the festival via a complimentary ticket scheme and/or travel bursary, we can also be reached directly at tickets@jalicollective.co.uk. We work with an outreach consultant and three cultural advisors who live and work in Edinburgh, have an interest in film, and have strong relationships with their communities. The point is not only to make sure the Weekender reaches people who do not already move in film-festival circles, but to make sure those audiences are part of the programming, its inception and the way we think about the event from the beginning. In 2025, for 20% of the Weekender’s audience it was their first time at a film festival, and for 40% their first time at Filmhouse (our venue), and over 40% of the audience lived outside of Edinburgh’s city centre. That’s exciting, and encouraging, it reaffirms that audiences want to go on this journey with us, and although they’re not in the gritty day-to-day of it all, they’re constantly with us. We also have audience statistics from last year, including figures on people who had never previously attended a film festival and people who had never been to Filmhouse. Those figures were not stated in the recorded interview, so they would need to be added separately.

In an interview with Eilidh Akilade, there was mention of the collective outliving you. Although the collective and Film Weekender is still in its infancy, what steps are you consciously taking to ensure this continuous existence? 

Jali Collective: A lot of that comes back to the word collective. From the beginning, we have been very intentional about building something that is not driven by any one person’s ego or individual vision. Film festivals and programming can sometimes become very personality-led, where the tastes, ambitions, or profile of the curator become central to the work. That is not what we are interested in. If the work is not useful to, wanted by, or meaningful for the communities we are trying to serve, there is very little point in us doing it. That is why we have tried to embed collective decision-making and community involvement into the structure of Jali from the outset, rather than treating engagement as something that happens after a programme has already been decided. As we grow, we want that to mean inviting more people into the organisation, bringing in different perspectives and creating genuine opportunities for other people to shape what Jali becomes.

There is also a very practical side to longevity. We are trying to establish processes, ways of working and organisational structures that give Jali greater stability and make the work sustainable, rather than having everything live in the heads or depend on the labour of the three of us. We are still early in that process, but the ambition is to build something that can continue to evolve beyond us as founders. We have always talked about Jali outliving us because, in many ways, it was never just ours to begin with.