UnRest, a powerful new documentary that details the uneasy legacy of human remains discovered at Prestwich Street in Green Point, Cape Town, received its European premiere at Charles University in Prague recently. The film was directed by renowned academic, curator and filmmaker Professor Siona O’Connell of the University of Pretoria’s (UP) Faculty of Humanities.

Following its European debut in October, UnRest is set to make its South African debut on 22 November. The Prague screening formed part of the official launch of the Horizon Europe-funded project Colonial Legacies of Universities: Materialities and New Collaborations (COLUMN).

UnRest revisits the moment in 2003 when construction workers uncovered a burial ground believed to contain the remains of enslaved and displaced people from the 18th and 19th centuries. The discovery ignited a heated debate between archaeologists asserting scientific authority and community groups who demanded the remains be treated as ancestors rather than artefacts. Prof O’Connell’s film delves into these unresolved tensions, linking them to broader global conversations about institutional accountability and the ethics of remembrance.

“The Prestwich Street discovery revealed how post-apartheid archaeology failed to decolonise its epistemological frameworks – institutions continued asserting authority over remains that communities regarded as ancestral,” Prof O’Connell says. “This tension between institutional power and communal memory aligned directly with COLUMN’s examination of how many universities reproduce colonial legacies, making the film a vital contribution to interrogating academic complicity in perpetuating historical injustices.”

Challenging colonial narratives

Prof O’Connell is one of South Africa’s foremost thinkers on memory, restitution and visual culture. Based at UP’s Faculty of Humanities, she has spent much of her career examining how visual and narrative forms can challenge colonial and apartheid-era silences. Her earlier works include An Impossible Return and In Gods Naam, both of which engage with questions of displacement, belonging, and the ethics of representation. Her scholarship and creative practice converge on the idea that decolonial work must be grounded in ethics, community dialogue, and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths about power and knowledge.

Prof O’Connell says UnRest is not only a historical reflection but a call to action. “The unresolved tensions at Prestwich Street – treating human remains as scientific specimens versus recognising them as ancestors – persist globally,” she said. “The memorial ossuary’s present condition exemplifies incomplete transformation: institutions still struggle to redistribute epistemic authority from academic expertise to community custodianship. Critically, decolonial struggles are not merely retrospective; they concern present-day social justice and the ethical positions we take.”

Global partnerships

The film forms part of the multi-partner COLUMN initiative, an ambitious transnational research and artistic collaboration that examines how universities across Europe and the Global South can confront and redress their colonial legacies. COLUMN explores the material and intangible traces of empire that persist in academic institutions – from anthropological collections and botanical gardens to campus architecture and research methodologies. It seeks to develop new, collaborative curatorial and educational practices that foreground voices and knowledge systems historically marginalised by colonialism.

UP is one of COLUMN’s leading partners, alongside institutions such as Utrecht University, Charles University, the University of Bologna, and the Anton de Kom University of Suriname. The project is co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe Programme and the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI).

Within this global framework, UnRest exemplifies the kind of cross-disciplinary, socially engaged work COLUMN promotes. By fusing visual storytelling, ethics and academic critique, Prof O’Connell brings the concerns of decolonial scholarship to public audiences. As she explains, “Visual storytelling circumvents academic gatekeeping, rendering contested histories accessible beyond scholarly circles whilst capturing affective dimensions – grief, dispossession, ancestral connection – that peer-reviewed scholarship sanitises. Documentary enables communities to speak directly, challenging extractive research paradigms. By presenting Prestwich Street remains as human beings who suffered and resisted rather than archaeological data, film restores the humanity that both slavery and academic objectification sought to erase.”

The Prague premiere also marked a symbolic step in connecting European and African academic legacies. “Premiering at a European research consortium positions South African decolonial struggles within global conversations about institutional accountability, challenging Northern institutions to recognise their ongoing complicity,” Prof O’Connell says. “The movement from Prague to South Africa enacts the shift the film advocates: from observation to position-taking, from passive reflection to active solidarity.”

The screening was attended by academics, curators and students from across Europe, following the launch of the COLUMN project and a keynote address by Professor Loretta Feris, UP Vice-Principal: Academic. Her lecture, ‘Education in Displacement: Universities as Sites of Memory and Change’, similarly explored the university as both a product and a potential challenger of colonial hierarchies.

For Prof O’Connell, the discussions sparked by UnRest are not about the past alone. “The film should prompt reflection on whether academic ‘neutrality’ perpetuates harm when silence becomes complicity,” she said. “UnRest invites us to recognise that being human requires honouring the humanity denied to those who came before; naming present injustice; and actively working towards futures built on dignity – a shift requiring not just inquiry but ethical commitment and positioned action.”

Following its European debut and forthcoming South African premiere, UnRest is expected to ignite fresh public debate about how South Africa commemorates its enslaved and displaced ancestors – and how universities might contribute to a more just reimagining of heritage and history.

>> UnRest will be screened in Cape Town on 22 November at the SA Sendinggestig Museum. Read more here


Watch a clip from the documentary