Colonialism

Zama, an officer of the Spanish Crown born in South America, waits for a letter from the King granting him a transfer from the town in which he is stagnating, to a better place. His situation is delicate. He must ensure that nothing overshadows his transfer. He is forced to accept submissively every task entrusted to him by successive Governors who come and go as he stays behind. The years go by and the letter from the King never arrives. When Zama notices everything is lost, he joins a party of soldiers that go after a dangerous bandit. More

Embrace of the Serpent tells the epic story of the first contact, encounter, approach, betrayal and, eventually, life-transcending friendship, between Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman, last survivor of his people, and two scientists that, over the course of 40 years, travel through the Amazon in search of a sacred plant that can heal them. Inspired by the journals of the first explorers of the Colombian Amazon, Theodor Koch-Grunberg and Richard Evans Schultes. More

In the Ottoman province of Hijaz during World War I, a young Bedouin boy experiences a greatly hastened coming of age as he embarks on a perilous desert journey to guide a British officer to his secret destination.In 1916, in the Hejaz Province of the Ottoman Empire, the young Bedouin Theeb (Jacir Eid) is learning from his elder brother Hussein (Hussein Salameh) the skills for everyday survival in their harsh environment. More

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Indochina 1931, the Siam Golf. A small family strives against destitution. The mother realizes that the departure of her two grown children - Joseph 20 and Suzanne 16 - is ineluctable. Deceived by the colonial administration, she invested all of her savings in worthless, regularly flooded farmland. Driven to fight against the corrupted bureaucrats who conned her, she puts into place a crazy scheme: building a dam against the sea with the help of the villagers... More

Birdwatchers (La terra degli uomini rossi) is a film set in Brazil, in the Matto Grosso do Sul. It depicts the breakdown of a community of Guarani-Kaiowa native Indians whilst attempting to reclaim their ancestral land from a local farmer. More

Travelling up and down the majestic river Congo on a disheveled boat, the young orphan Antoine Kolosoy composed his first songs on a beat up old guitar. As he gained renown, the young “Wendo,” as he was now known, was persecuted by the church and his music banned by the Belgian Colonial authorities, who feared his joyful rhythms would stir unrest. Wendo became a professional boxer for a time, but he never put down his guitar for long, and when his first album was released in 1948 he became the first superstar of Congolese Rumba. More

Madeinusa is a girl aged 14 who lives in an isolated village in the Cordillera Blanca Mountain range of Peru. This strange place is characterized by its religious fervor. From Good Friday at three o'clock in the afternoon (the time of day when Christ died on the cross) to Easter Sunday, the whole village can do whatever it feels like. During the two holy days sin does not exist: God is dead and can't see what is happening. Everything is accepted and allowed, without remorse. More

More than 4 000 km through the immense forest équatorial... Beyond the technical and human performance (seven months of turning under extreme conditions), it is with a diving in the heart of a bloodless but splendid country that the film delivers throughout course of this majestic river. More

The beautiful woman Melé is a bar singer, her husband Chaka is out of work. The couple that lives in Bamako, the capital of Mali, is on the verge of breaking up... In the courtyard of the house, where they live together with other families, a trial court has been set up. African civil society spokesmen have taken proceedings against the World Bank and the IMF, whom they blame for Africa's woes... Amidst the pleas and the testimonies, life goes on in the courtyard. Chaka does not seem to be concerned by this novel Africa's desire to fight for its rights. More

This film is about the degraded socio-economic condition of Argentina leading to the December 2001 rebellions, and its consequent social chaos analyzed by focusing on real people from Buenos Aires poorest shantytowns, crumbling hospitals, and women middle class farmers fighting multi national banks that are shamelessly appropriating their farmlands. More

After the fall of the military dictatorship in 1983, successive democratic governments launched a series of reforms purporting to turn Argentina into the world's most liberal and prosperous economy. Less than twenty years later, the Argentinians have lost literally everything: major national companies have been sold well below value to foreign corporations; the proceeds of privatizations have been diverted into the pockets of corrupt officials; revised labour laws have taken away all rights from employees; in a country that is traditionally an important exporter of foodstuffs, malnutrition More

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Lagaan takes place in the small village of Champaner, now in the State of Gujarat, in western India during the height of the British Empire in India in 1893. Captain Andrew Russell, the commanding officer of the Champaner cantonment, has imposed high taxes (lagaan) on people from the local villages which they are unable to pay due to a prolonged drought. Led by Bhuvan, the villagers beg Raja Puran Singh to help them. He tells them that much to his regret, he is also bound by British law. It is after their visit to the Raja that the people of the village first witness a cricket match. More

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Seventeen-year-old Nhâm lives with his mother, little sister and sister-in-law Ngu in a remote village in Vietnam. His father died in the war, his brother moved away to find work elsewhere. The three work day after day in the rice fields. Between Nhâm and Ngu evolves a quiet, deep relationship. But the beautiful Quyen, who has lived in the USA for years and now returns to her native village even if only for a short time, turns Nhâm's head. Quyen seems to be only marginally aware of Nhâm's growing admiration and not at all aware of Ngus' wordless jealousy. More

An apparently amiable film crew from La Paz leaves for a village in the mountains of Bolivia to shoot a custume drama about the arrival of the Spanish Conquistadores in the Andes in the sixteenth century. The film-makers get involved with the local population, mainly Indian. Their attempts to use the Indians as extras in their film, as victims of the callous Spaniards, is however a failure. After their request is categorically refused, they do manage to 'persuade' several inhabitants of a neighbouring village. The production is saved, but the incidents pile up. More

Powerful, moving and highly acclaimed, director Haile Gerima’s Sankofa is a masterpiece of cinema that has had a transformative impact on audiences since its release in 1993.  This empowering film tells a story of slavery and of the African Diaspora from the perspective of the enslaved, challenging the romanticizing of slavery prevalent in American culture. More

A young man living in a cold southern village in South America, decides to start a trip looking for his father. By doing this he discovers unexpected facts about his Latin American essence. More

To the dusty streets of Colobane, a once charming village now devastated by poverty, Linguère Ramatou returns with fabulous wealth and a promise to save her people. But, tied to this promise is a deadly bargain: Draman Drameh — the lover who had betrayed a 16-year-old, pregnant Linguère — must be executed. The announcement is made during a celebratory banquet in honour of her return. The villagers, who had long forgotten the incident, are at once confused, horrified and outraged. More

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In this last film Ritwik Ghatak himself plays Nilkantha Bagchi, an alcoholic, in the character's own words «a broken intellectual». His wife leaves him taking away his books and records which were his only properties left. When Bagchi insisted she shouldn't, Durga replied that she is taking this away so that his son grows up with these books and music, but he managed to keep a fan which he sells to buy country liquor to start his unusual and abstract ride. More

This film is an homage to the rich an complex history of Latin America. Without any narrative sequence, but with a serie of images, music and sounds, the spectator gets transported through Mexico's history. More

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Gaston Kaboré’s movie «Zan Boko explores the conflict between tradition and modernity with a family in a rural contexr. It has been for long time a central theme in many African films. Kaboré tells the poignant story of a village family swept up in the current tide of urbanization. In doing so, «Zan Boko» expertly reveals the transformation of an agrarian, subsistence society into an industrialized commodity economy. More

Vivid social satire with overtones of Romeo and Juliet, Finye (The Wind) tackles the generation gap in post-colonial West Africa. Its heroine is the pot smoking daughter of a provincial military governor who falls in love with a fellow university student, the descendent of one of Mali's chiefs of an earlier age. Both families object to the union and to the lover's growing involvement in student strikes against the corrupt government. A mix of politics, romance and social commentary, Finye casts a critical eye on both the ancient and modern values. More

First presented and highly debated at the 1980 Venice Film Festival, this film became the legacy of the late Glauber Rocha, who noted: "A idade da terra (The Age of the Earth) is the decomposition of the narrative sequence without losing the infrastructural discourse that is supposed to materialize the most representative signs of the Third World. The film offers a symphony of images and sound or is an anti-symphony that puts the essential problems into the background. This film can only be classified in this way: He is my portrait next to the portrait of Brazil." More

Mory, a cowherd who rides a motorcycle mounted with a cow's skull, and Anta, a university student, have met in Dakar, Senegal's capital. Alienated and disaffected with Senegal and Africa, they long to go to Paris and work up different con schemes to raise the money. Mory steals clothing and money from a wealthy gay man who had brought him home, and he and Anta book passage on a ship to France. One of the most important, engaged and fascinating movies from Africa - selected for the documenta 2007. More

Notes and Testimonies on Neocolonialism, Violence and Liberation” is one of the symbols of cultural and political resistence in the 60-70s generation. The film is a reflection essay on the socio-political situation of Argentina between 1945 and 1968. It was filmed clandestinely in Cold War times in a Latin America rules by pro-American oligarchies and military dictatorships. The work is a four-hours-long trilogy divided in chapters and united by the themes of dependence and liberation. More

In Lucía, Humberto Solás has interpreted the theme of the hundred years' struggle in an entirely novel way to create an epic in three separate episodes: each centred around a woman called Lucía, which takes place in a different period of Cuban history, corresponding to the three stages of Colonialism, Neocolonialism and Socialist Revolution. The three episodes also present us with "Lucías" of different social classes. More

Komal Gandhar, also known as A Soft Note on a Sharp Scale, refers in its title to the Hindustani equivalent of "E-flat". It was part of the trilogy composed of «Meghe Dhaka Tara» (1960), «Komal Gandhar» and «Subarnarekha» (1962), all dealing with the aftermath of the Partition of India in 1947 and the refugees coping with it, though this was the most optimistic film of his oeuvre. More