Josef Gugler is professor emeritus in sociology at the University of Connecticut, where he written extensively on film, Middle Eastern politics, and urbanization in Africa. Since 1961, Dr. Gugler has performed research or served as a visiting lecturer in Nigeria, Tanzania, the Congo, Uganda, Kenya, and Senegal. In 1991, he began teaching a course at the University of Connecticut titled “Modern Africa: Re-Imaging Africa through Films and Novels,” and he published African Film: Re-Imaging a Continent through Indiana University Press in 1993. In 2015, Dr. Gugler donated the research materials accumulated from his work overseas and his teaching and writing projects to the BFC/A.

The Josef Gugler African and Middle Eastern Film Collection assembles promotional materials for films produced in Africa or the Middle East or directed by African and Middle Eastern filmmakers. The collection represents over 500 films by nearly 350 directors across a variety of promotional formats, including film posters, pressbooks, chirashi flyers, lobby and storefront cards, handbills, photographs, slides, and audiovisual recordings. Materials related to films by American and Western European directors depicting the Middle East and Africa, such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Out of Africa (1985), are also included. The more than 1,100 posters in the collection span from 1947-2010, comprising productions from France, Algeria, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Iran, Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, and almost three dozen additional countries. The photographic collection includes production slides and stills for 60 different films, as well as 41 candid prints of African filmmakers like Moussa Sene Absa, Flora Gomes, Dani Koyaté, Sarah Maldoror, Isrissa Ouédraogo, Ousmane Sembène, Ingrid Sinclair, and Cheik Oumar Sissoko.

Notable among the audiovisual materials are 16mm prints of Ousmane Sembène's films Mandabi (1968), Tauw (1970), and Xala (1975) and Sara Maldoror’s Sambizanga (1972). The collection’s more than 200 DVD and VHS tapes (as well as CD and LP soundtracks) represent hundreds of films from across the Middle East and Africa, many of them not widely commercially available in the United States. "

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