This film travels over open books, looted objects and postcards to look for the imperial foundations of the world in which we live. Within this wide landscape the film focuses on the destruction of the Jewish Muslim world that existed in North Africa, making it imaginable and inhabitable again. Narrated in the first person, by an Algerian Jew and a Palestinian Jew, the film refuses imperial histories of those places. Objects held captive in museums and archives outside of the places from where they were looted are only the visible tip of the iceberg of the mass colonial plunder of Africa. The film explores the substantial wealth accumulated through the extraction of raw materials, labour, knowledge and skills, including the “visual wealth” attained by putting people in front of the colonisers’ cameras.
2023-01-18
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Since its adoption in June 1955 by the Congress movement, the Freedom Charter has been the key political document that acted as a beacon and source of inspiration in the liberation struggle against Apartheid. It was reputedly the main source that informed democratic South Africa’s liberal constitution and a constant reference point for the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and rival political parties that it spawned since 1994, all claiming the Freedom Charter’s legacy. Freedom Isn’t Free assesses the history and role of the charter, especially in relation to key political and socio-economic aspects of developments in South Africa up to the present period. It includes rare archival footage with interviews of a cross-section of outspoken influential South Africans.
This hour-long documentary is a provocative look at a historical event of which few Americans are aware. In mid-January, 1893, armed troops from the U.S.S Boston landed at Honolulu in support of a treasonous coup d’état against the constitutional sovereign of the Hawaiian Kingdom, Queen Lili‘uokalani. The event was described by U.S. President Grover Cleveland as an "act of war."
"Djazaïrouna", produced by the cinema service of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA), is a montage film intended to inform the international community at the UN in 1959 on the objectives pursued by the Algerian resistance during the war of 'Algeria. Independence in Algeria (1954-1962). In 1959, Djamel-Eddine Chanderli and Mohammed Lakdar-Hamina produced Djazaïrouna (Our Algeria) from images taken by René Vautier and Doctor Pierre Chaulet. This film, completed a little later and will result in the film “The Voice of the People”. This documentary on the history of Algeria through a montage of current events, traces the political and military actions of the A.L.N, the demonstrations of December 1960, and the attack on a fortified French base on the border between Algeria and Tunisia.
As queer trans and gender non-conforming children of the Vietnamese diaspora, we are fragmented at the crossroads of being displaced from not only a sense of belonging to our ancestral land, but also our own bodies which are conditioned by society to stray away from our most authentic existence. Yet these bodies of ours are the vessels we sail to embark on a lifetime voyage of return to our original selves. It is our bodies that navigate the treacherous tides of normative systems that impose themselves on our very being. And it is our bodies that act as community lighthouses for collective liberation. Ultimately, the landscape of our bodies is our blueprint to remembering, to healing, to blooming.
Many geneticists and archaeologists have long surmised that human life began in Africa. Dr. Spencer Wells, one of a group of scientists studying the origin of human life, offers evidence and theories to support such a thesis in this PBS special. He claims that Africa was populated by only a few thousand people that some deserted their homeland in a conquest that has resulted in global domination.
Thousands of Hongkongers, still living in the shadow of the 2019 protests, are immigrating to the UK to forge a freer future. This film documents their struggle to break free from a homeland that is no longer welcoming, while holding on to the Hongkonger identity in which they find purpose. In exile, can the Hongkonger identity persevere, or is it destined to obscurity? Can they really find a place to call home?
Born to Korean immigrant parents freed from indentured servitude in early twentieth century Mexico, Jerónimo Lim Kim joins the Cuban Revolution with his law school classmate Fidel Castro and becomes an accomplished government official in the Castro regime, until he rediscovers his ethnic roots and dedicates his later life to reconstructing his Korean Cuban identity. After Jerónimo's death, younger Korean Cubans recognize his legacy, but it is not until they are presented with the opportunity to visit South Korea that questions about their mixed identity resurface.
The story of Cuban refugees who risked their lives in homemade rafts to reach the United States, and what life is like for those who succeed.
Guillermo Gómez Álvarez explores the identity politics of Puerto Rico via archival footage from various sources that clash with nine original songs from local independent musicians and a thematic analysis from a psychoanalyst and a historian. From the juxtaposition the absurd becomes coherent and the coherent becomes absurd as Puerto Rican identity is defined and rejected almost simultaneously.
There is an interlinking history of violent European colonialism and the cultural legacy of ethnographic collections in institutions. This documentary traces the progression of colonial history from the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 to the systematic elimination of cultural traditions, religions and lifeways which would occur sporadically through genocides and warfare until the early 20th century throughout the African continent—surveying the inquiries and movements for historical justice, the relationships between European institutions and colonial violence and following enduring struggles against these organisations to regain what was taken.
Montezuma is a 2009 BBC Television documentary film in which Dan Snow examines the reign of the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma II.
A desktop documentary that focuses on the Golden Record that NASA sent into space in the late 1970s. The piece reflects on issues such as the power of scientific discourse to produce revisions of the world, the evolution of the concept of the archive and the resignification of borders in the rhetoric of space colonialism.
Concerning Violence is based on newly discovered, powerful archival material documenting the most daring moments in the struggle for liberation in the Third World, accompanied by classic text from The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon.
How African artists have spread African culture all over the world, especially music, since the harsh years of decolonization, trying to offer a nicer portrait of this amazing continent, historically known for tragic subjects, such as slavery, famine, war and political chaos.
Part of a series of promotional films commissioned by Romania's National Tourism Office in the early 1970s with the aim of reconnecting diasporic communities with the country they left behind. In this case, the film is addressed to Jews who emigrated in the context of the Second World War or were sold by the Romanian state to the State of Israel starting in the 50s and settled in Israel and the USA - therefore, a target group made up of seniors, probably retired , possibly prosperous, eager to revisit the places of youth and willing to forget, temporarily, the traumas associated with them.
An exhaustive explanation of how the military occupation of an invaded territory occurs and its consequences, using as a paradigmatic example the recent history of Israel and the Palestinian territories, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, from 1967, when the Six-Day War took place, to the present day; an account by filmmaker Avi Mograbi enriched by the testimonies of Israeli army veterans.
Short documentary commissioned by the magazine Présence Africaine. From the question "Why is the African in the anthropology museum while Greek or Egyptian art are in the Louvre?", the directors expose and criticize the lack of consideration for African art. The film was censored in France for eight years because of its anti-colonial perspective.