Region: Eastern Africa
A Costa dos Murmúrios (The Murmuring Coast)
- Director: Margarida Cardoso
- Release Date: 2004
- Production Country: Portugal
Moving from Lisbon from Mozambique to marry her fiance, a Portuguese soldier, Evita realizes in the months after the wedding that her husband little resembles the man she fell in love with. Left alone when he is sent on an extended military mission, Evita refuses to remain secluded in the "safe" part of the city as commanded, but as she comes face to face with the ugly reality of a land fighting for its freedom from colonial oppression, can she find a way to help, or is she doomed as a woman to simply cower in acceptance of her husband and her nation's violence?
Adwa: An African Victory
- Director: Haile Gerima
- Release Date: 1999
- Production Country: United States, Germany, Ethiopia
An Italian army, desperately low on morale and supplies, plans one last attack against an Ethiopian force despite being inferior in numbers, leadership, and armament. The decisive victory of Africans over Europeans became a near mythical event in African history and left Ethiopia as the only African country that was not overrun by colonial powers.
Africa Speaks!
- Director: Walter Futter
- Release Date: 1930
- Production Country: United States
Africa is a land of many wonders, filled with people and animals unlike any that Europe and the United States have seen. Filmmaker Paul Hoefler spent a year travelling through central Africa, recording the people and their world in order to show the western world what he found so fascinating about the "Dark Continent."
Against All Flags
- Director: George Sherman
- Release Date: 1952
- Production Country: United States
British naval officer Brian Hawke infiltrates a band of pirates in the Indian Ocean and proceeds to save the princess, out-duel the pirate captain, and convince the beautiful Spitfire that a pirate's life is not for her.
Beau Travail
- Director: Claire Denis
- Release Date: 1999
- Production Country: France
Though Galoup has devoted his best efforts to serving his unit and his commanding officer in the French Foreign Legion, he has never received the recognition that he feels he deserves; so, with the arrival of Sentain, who is prettier, smarter, and more popular, Galoup takes steps to ensure that his competition is eliminated.
Black Hawk Down
- Director: Ridley Scott
- Release Date: 2001
- Production Country: United States
An initially successful Delta Force raid into Mogadishu to capture a Somali warlord goes awry when two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters flying support are shot down, leading to a drawn-out battle through the streets of Mogadishu between the Special Forces soldiers and the Somali militia, two groups, each desperate to be the first to reach the downed soldiers, though for very different reasons.
Darwin's Nightmare
- Director: Hubert Sauper
- Release Date: 2004
- Production Country: Austria, Belgium, France, Canada, Finland, Sweden
Beautiful Lake Victoria is at the center of a brutal cycle of survival of the fittest. Illegal guns are flown in and fish, the imported Nile Perch, is flown out. The perch is an expensive delicacy, but its importation has devastated the local ecosystem, leaving families in the are struggling to survive, causing the destruction of communities and governments, which feeds the unrest of the people, which feeds the need for guns...
Desert Flower
- Director: Sherry Horman
- Release Date: 2009
- Production Country: United Kingdom, Germany, Austria
Born into a desert nomad family in Somalia, Waris Dirie flees her home to avoid an arranged marriage, and builds a career as a supermodel in Europe, but she finds her true life purpose when she speaks publicly about female genital mutilation and launches a campaign to end the practice, bringing education and a better standard of living to children in her homeland.
Gardiens de la mémoire (Keepers of Memory)
- Director: Eric Kabera
- Release Date: 2004
- Production Country: Rwanda
The Rwandan genocide left many things to revisit and document, primarily the survivors, the memorials, both planned and unplanned, created and recorded in the landscape for those lost, and also the memory-keepers, those who cannot forget and refuse to let the world forget.
God Grew Tired of Us: The Story of Lost Boys of Sudan
- Director: Christopher Dillon Quinn, Tommy Walker
- Release Date: 2006
- Production Country: United States
John Bul Dau, Daniel Pach, and Panther Bior survive civil war, the murder of their people, and a years' long trek in search of safety. Therefore, now that they have been invited to live and study in the United States, their worries should be over... However, even in the comfort and safety of their new homes, they cannot forget the ones they have left behind.
Hotel Rwanda
- Director: Terry George
- Release Date: 2004
- Production Country: United Kingdom, United States, Italy, South Africa
As Hutu extremists hunt down and brutally murder their Tutsi neighbors, Paul Rusesabagina, a Hutu whose own marriage crosses ethnic lines, finds himself responsible for hundreds of Tutsi and other refugees, forcing him to step up as the central player in a desperate struggle to save lives in the midst of madness and carnage.
In Search of Myths and Heroes
- Director: Jeremy Jeffs
- Release Date: 2005
- Production Country: United Kingdom
The stories of the Queen of Sheba, Shangri-La, King Arthur, and Jason chasing the Golden Fleece have captivated the western world for centuries, but is there anything to them beyond myth and legend?
Le jour où Dieu est parti en voyage (The Day God Walked Away)
- Director: Philippe Van Leeuw
- Release Date: 2009
- Production Country: France, Belgium
As her Belgian employers and their children are being evacuated to safety, Jacqueline, a Tutsi, survives the first wave of the Rwandan genocide by hiding in the Belgian family’s attic, all the while fearing for her children’s lives. When she finally makes her way home, her worst fears are realized and, though she escapes into the forest with her own life, she teeters on the edge of madness as she searches for a reason to continue living.
Lost Boys of Sudan
- Director: Megan Mylan, Jon Shenk
- Release Date: 2003
- Production Country: United States
Two young boys of the Dinka people survive civil war in the Sudan, a trek across thousands of miles of African terrain, and life in an Ethiopian refugee camp, but their most challenging task might be to adjust to a secure life in the United States.
Machine Gun Preacher
- Director: Marc Forster
- Release Date: 2011
- Production Country: United States
When ex-convict and former drug addict Sam Childers goes to Africa for the first time, he finds a new use for the skills he had learned as an outlaw biker: rescuing orphans from their lives as child soldiers and sex slaves in the Lord's Resistance Army and leading armed rescue missions in the dangerous territories controlled by the LRA.
Motherland
- Director: Owen 'Alik Shahadah
- Release Date: 2010
- Production Country: United States, United Kingdom
Motherland tells the story of the continent where modern civilization was born, but this time the history of Africa is told with the African people at the center of the story rather than through their interactions with the rest of the world.
Nirgendwo in Afrika (Nowhere in Africa)
- Director: Caroline Link
- Release Date: 2001
- Production Country: Germany
Hoping to avoid persecution, a Jewish family leaves Germany in the 1930s and settles on a farm in Kenya, where—though a vastly different world from Germany—they make a life for themselves. But the war reaches even into Africa and, when the British round up all the German settlers and confine them (regardless of religion or heritage), fault lines within the family are exposed and the family's survival may be their destruction.
Out of Africa
- Director: Sydney Pollack
- Release Date: 1985
- Production Country: United States
Seeking a new beginning in Africa, Karen Blixen finds the men in her life there as uncontrollable as the landscape itself, from a philandering husband to her doomed love affair with the big game hunter who has gone native. Eventually, broke and broken-hearted, Karen prepares to return to Denmark, bringing nothing with her as she journeys out of Africa.
Pandemic: Facing AIDS
- Director: Rory Kennedy
- Release Date: 2003
- Production Country: United States
Five different nations, five different stories, one disease, and one result. Five different families, one each in Russia, India, Brazil, Uganda, and Thailand, provide human faces and realities to the devastating impact of AIDS upon the world.
Racism: A History
- Director: Paul Tickell
- Release Date: 2007
- Production Country: United Kingdom
In the 19th century, much of the western leadership and intelligentsia embraced eugenics, a 'science' that 'proved' their racial superiority–and that wreaked havoc on three non-European continents.