Sankofa Film and Video Collective was founded in 1983 by Isaac Julien, Martina Attille,[1] Maureen Blackwood,[2] Nadine Marsh-Edwards[3] and Robert Crusz, who all graduated from various art colleges in London.
[5] The name and the logo of the collective derive from the Akan word sankofa from Ghana, meaning "return and fetch it", represented figuratively as a bird turning its head back towards its tail, to signify "going back into the past and discovering knowledge that will be of benefit to the people in the future.
"[2] The formation of Sankofa Film and Video Collective, like that of the Black Audio Film Collective, was a response to the social unrest in Britain in the 1980s: "Influenced by contemporary debate on post-colonialism and social theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall, both groups centered around investigations of black identity/culture within the British experience and reworked the documentary to articulate new voices in British cinema.
"[6] Sankofa's first film, and Isaac Julien's directorial debut in 1983, was Who Killed Colin Roach?
- a reflection on the death of a young black man in suspicious circumstances at the entrance of an east London police station.