The idea of restitution acquired its modern meaning in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars; today, it is most commonly applied to tangible cultural heritage that has been looted or otherwise displaced in the context of colonial rule. In contemporary parlance, the term is often narrowly understood as the return of artifacts that were acquired through unjust means or unequal exchange. Within this framework, national heritage institutions act as both present custodians and potential recipients, while state-level cultural diplomacy serves as the principal mechanism of arbitration (see Savoy 2026). In practice, however, the mandate of nation-states to reappropriate and safeguard displaced heritage is less clear-cut. The 2024 repatriation of Asante artefacts from the United Kingdom illustrates this point: The Victoria and Albert Museum concluded a three-year loan agreement with the current Asante king, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, thereby sidestepping the Ghanaian government’s demand of a permanent return and transfer of property titles.

For the world’s displaced audiovisual heritage, questions of provenance and belonging are especially difficult to untangle. As early as the 1950s, African filmmakers and intellectuals were calling for the return of foreign-produced images and sounds of Africa – materials over which colonial officials, ethnographers, and missionaries claimed ownership, and which to this day remain archived in former colonial metropoles (see, e.g., Vieyra 1958). After independence, film production across sub-Saharan Africa was pulled toward Europe through co-production schemes and entrenched forms of technological dependence, notably on overseas commercial laboratories for the development of negatives. This structural extraversion of African cinema – which extends from film production to archiving and preservation – helps to explain why, according to a 2021 UNESCO report, “the best surviving elements for historic African films are almost never found in Africa” (Lora-Mungai, Pimenta, et al. 2021, 37). While filmmakers or their heirs may be involved when African films are selected for Northern-led restoration projects, national archives and other relevant stakeholders on the continent are not necessarily included.

Examples of displaced film heritage abound, from films of exile and migration to works displaced amid wars of conquest, in the wake of state repression, or through the dissolution of states and empires. Yet the provenance of such works rarely conforms to the template of interstate, war-like plunder underpinning the modern idea of restitution, paradigmatic cases – such as the “Beutefilme” captured by the Nazis during World War II or the looting of Palestinian film heritage by the Israeli Defence Forces during the 1982 siege of Beirut – notwithstanding (see, e.g., Le Roy 2016, Habashneh 2023). As with Africa’s postcolonial cinemas, the trajectories of displacement more often than not point to profound and persistent transnational entanglements that complicate, and at times undermine, national heritage frameworks.

A paranational perspective on audiovisual restitution would begin from the insight that displaced film heritage cannot always be adequately understood through the twin coordinates of national ownership and interstate return. Rather than seeking to resolve complex archival histories into a single rightful place of origin, it attends to the uneven networks of extraction, circulation, and technological dependence through which moving images have been produced, transmitted, and preserved. Such a perspective does not displace the demand for restitution but rather widens its scope beyond the physical return of objects to include questions of archival access, authority, and capacity. Applied to the audiovisual in the digital age, the meaning of restitution shifts from a finite act of repatriation to an ongoing process of relational repair and material reparation, unfolding across polities, institutions, and communities whose claims may be overlapping, asymmetrical, and historically entangled (see Perneczky and Valenti 2026).