Subject: Colonialism
The ideals and acts of one culture dominating another were not just perpetrated by Columbus or the British.
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."
Afrique, je te plumerai (Africa, I Will Fleece You)
- Director: Jean-Marie Téno
- Release Date: 1993
- Production Country: Cameroon, France, Germany
Expressions of Cameroon's indigenous culture were not only repressed by colonial governments, but rooted out and systematically destroyed, at first by Europeans and then by the strongmen who came to power as the only tolerable alternative to the European interests that still control much of the country's economic interests.
Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre: The Wrath of God)
- Director: Werner Herzog
- Release Date: 1972
- Production Country: West Germany
A brief mission by a small group of conquistadors sent to explore up the Amazon becomes a nightmare when one of the men leads a mutiny, refusing to turn back because he believes that El Dorado lies ahead of them, up the river. Forced to continue their trip, the soldiers who supported the mutineer find themselves trapped with him as he descends into madness, but it's not clear if he is corrupted by his own dreams of power and avarice, or if the land itself taking revenge on the conquerors.
Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony
- Director: Lee Hirsch
- Release Date: 2002
- Production Country: South Africa, United States
In the struggle to overturn apartheid in South Africa, music was an essential tool; it built community, allowed communication, and provided a common language for people to share their story both within South Africa and with the rest of the world.
Araya
- Director: Margot Benacerraf
- Release Date: 1959
- Production Country: Venezuela, France
The Spanish Conquistadors discovered the Araya Salt Mine in Venezuela and, in the five hundred years since, the people have continued to mine the salt as it 'always' has been done.
Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès (To Be Twenty in the Aures)
- Director: René Vautier
- Release Date: 1972
- Production Country: France
A group of Breton pacifists are sent to fight in Algeria, but one refuses to become a soldier and goes on the run with an escaped Algerian prisoner.
Black Robe
- Director: Bruce Beresford
- Release Date: 1991
- Production Country: Canada, Australia, United States
A trip to check on a distant Catholic mission in Quebec becomes a journey through terror and faith as a young Jesuit priest and his Algonquian guides are by turns accosted and captured on their way to the Huron village.
Bloody Sunday
- Director: Paul Greengrass
- Release Date: 2002
- Production Country: United Kingdom, Ireland
A peaceful civil rights march through Derry in protest of the British treatment of Catholic residents in Northern Ireland becomes a battleground when groups of teen-aged IRA recruits break off from the main march and attack British troops with bottles and rocks. As the situation deteriorates, orders are given to arrest the protestors, but the British troops, on edge after a week of unrest and violence, overreact (with tragic results) when the protestors flee.
Botany Bay
- Director: John Farrow
- Release Date: 1953
- Production Country: United States
Aboard the first convict ship bound for Australia, an American doctor is distraught over his unjust conviction and feuds with his fellow prisoners and the ship's captain. After many failed escape attempts, he finally embraces both his stormy relationship with a pretty female prisoner and his fate as one of the founding fathers of the state of Australia.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
- Director: Yves Simoneau
- Release Date: 2007
- Production Country: United States
During the US western expansion, gold is discovered on the Sioux reservation in South Dakota, resulting in tragedy for the Sioux Nation.
Ceddo (Outsiders)
- Director: Ousmane Sembene
- Release Date: 1977
- Production Country: Senegal
When their king converts to Islam and expects his people to follow, the villagers protest by kidnapping his daughter and then killing the men, including the heir to the throne, he sends to rescue her. But when the imam helps to murder the king in order to place his own more pliable candidate on the throne, the villagers rethink their loyalties and realize the princess is now their only hope to confront this new religious order.
Conquistadors
- Director: David Wallace
- Release Date: 2000
- Production Country: United Kingdom
Historian Michael Wood follows the trail of the Conquistadors from Spain into South America and Mexico.
Coup de Torchon
- Director: Bertrand Tavernier
- Release Date: 1981
- Production Country: France
Lucien Cordier is a failure on most accounts: he fails to keep his wife from cuckolding him, fails to earn the respect of his peers, and fails to make his mark on the landscape of his small colonial town—or has he?
Eksperimentet (The Experiment)
- Director: Louise Friedberg
- Release Date: 2010
- Production Country: Denmark
Idealistic nurse Gert, with no family of her own, is proud to take on the care of sixteen Inuit children who have returned to Greenland after having been forcibly removed to Denmark for a year of training as part of an experiment to "civilize" Greenland's subsistence hunting culture. But when both the children and the government fail to live up to Gert's expectations, Gert must find a way to reconcile her idealism with the realities of life.
El Bien Esquivo (The Good Bastard)
- Director: Augusto Tamayo San Román
- Release Date: 2001
- Production Country: Peru
Half-Quechua Jerónimo is seeking proof he is the legitimate son of a Spanish captain, while Sor Inés seeks to know if her calling to serve God is legitimate. Their paths intersect as they look for answers to their individual quests, at the same time Jesuit priests are on their own quest to bring the natives of the village into line with Catholic dogma, proceeding house by house to destroy any individual deviation from "proper" religious expression.
El Dorado
- Director: Carlos Saura
- Release Date: 1988
- Production Country: Spain, France, Italy
Convinced he is the only one who can lead an expedition in search of El Dorado, Aguirre mutinies and takes control of the expedition, then continuing down the Amazon, looting and pillaging on the way. But as the environment itself takes a toll on the Spanish expedition members and their leader becomes increasingly more unstable, it becomes less and less certain that they will survive their journey, or that they will all be in their right minds at the end of it.
El último malon (The Last Indian Attack)
- Director: Alcides Greca
- Release Date: 1917
- Production Country: Argentina
Re-enacting the last major Indian uprising in Argentina on location, the indigenous peoples portrayed their own ancestors in their last doomed battle against Argentinian armies.
Élise ou la vraie vie (Elise, or Real Life)
- Director: Michel Drach
- Release Date: 1970
- Production Country: France, Algeria
During the Algerian War, a young aristocratic girl in France rejects her heritage for a common life and falls in love with an Algerian immigrant.