How to Build a Library (+ short film) (Take One Action)

Name: How to Build a Library (+ short film) (Take One Action)
Genre: Documentary
Released: 2025-09-19
Duration: 1 h 43 min

BEYOND THE SCREEN: Join Take One Action in conversation after the films to discuss the nuances of decolonial processes in Scottish institutions, and how entangled they remain with their colonial pasts. Introduction and post-screening conversation will be presented with live captions. Access notes: Predominantly visual storytelling with mainly bright images. In Nairobi, Kenya, two women are on a mission to transform and decolonise a dilapidated library into a public space that truly serves its community. Two women in Nairobi, Shiro and Wachuka, have set out on an ambitious mission: to transform the neglected, historically whites-only McMillan Memorial Library into a vibrant, accessible public space that serves its local community. As the dust is brushed off the library’s archives of colonial Kenya and its stacks of books by majority non-African authors, thorny questions about the project emerge: found in every detail from the embedded bias of the Dewey Classification System, to the quietly troubling sources of funding they rely on to renovate the library. In a world where the call to “decolonise” our institutions has become widespread, How to Build a Library charts both the material and ideological complexities of what this means in practice. Plus short: Space to Breathe (Juicebox P. Burton, USA, 2025, English, 12min) - a queer, Afrofuturist science-fiction film about the journey to a future without prisons or police.DocumentaryPT1H43M12A2025-09-19

Christopher King

Maia Lekow

Christopher King

Maia Lekow

How to Build a Library (+ short film) (Take One Action)"How to Build a Library (+ short film) (Take One Action)"

Showtimes

September 19, 5:45 pm