Subject: Slavery & Abolition
Slavery is both a modern and an ancient issue, encompassing Ancient Rome, the Atlantic slave trade, and the modern-day sexual and domestic slavery trafficking, with many who have sought to abolish it.
Adanggaman
- Director: Roger Gnoan M'Bala
- Release Date: 2000
- Production Country: France, Switzerland, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Italy
Ossei believes his family to be killed and his village destroyed in a raid by their neighbor King Adanggaman; however, Ossei discovers that his mother is still alive and pursues the soldiers who are marching their captives to market, hoping to free her before she, along with the rest of his people, is sold into slavery.
Addio zio Tom (Goodbye Uncle Tom)
- Director: Gualtiero Jacopetti, Franco Prosperi
- Release Date: 1971
- Production Country: Italy
The lives of slaves in the antebellum United States present a graphic record of the brutal and inhuman treatment many African-American slaves endured.
Amistad
- Director: Steven Spielberg
- Release Date: 1997
- Production Country: United States
Thinking they are free when they escape their chains and overthrow their Spanish captors, a group of kidnapped Africans who were to be sold as slaves instead find themselves trapped in a Virginia courtroom where they are caught between the laws of three nations and must fight to prove their status as free human beings.
Anonymously Yours
- Director: Gayle Ferraro
- Release Date: 2002
- Production Country: United States
Four women in Myanmar from very different backgrounds share a common fate: they are trapped in the sex trade, a world in which even animals are considered more valuable than the victims who are often kidnapped and raped in order to force them to submit to further degradation as prostitutes.
Brazil: An Inconvenient History
- Director: Phil Grabsky
- Release Date: 2000
- Production Country: Brazil, United Kingdom
The last country to abolish slavery in the Western World, Brazil was by far the largest participant in the Atlantic slave trade, receiving nearly half of all Africans who survived the slave ships.
Call + Response
- Director: Justin Dillon
- Release Date: 2008
- Production Country: United States
Contrary to popular Western belief, slavery is alive and well in the 21st century. Experts and victims discuss the realities of the slave trade, such as children who are kidnapped to become soldiers or sex workers, while singers and other artists lend their talents in an attempt to raise awareness about the issue.
Gladiator
- Director: Ridley Scott
- Release Date: 2000
- Production Country: United States, United Kingdom
An enslaved Roman general becomes a gladiator and exacts revenge on the Emperor who had his family murdered.
La última cena (The Last Supper)
- Director: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
- Release Date: 1976
- Production Country: Cuba
In 18th-century Cuba, a plantation owner objects to cruelty inflicted on a recaptured runaway slave. Thus, he decides to re-enact the Last Supper of Christ by inviting twelve of his slaves to dine with him so he can instruct them about how being good slaves is pleasing to God; however, the slaves have their own ideas about justice and proper treatment.
Little Senegal
- Director: Rachid Bouchareb
- Release Date: 2001
- Production Country: Algeria, France, Germany
Guided by a dream of ancient ancestors, Alloune travels from Senegal to the United States in search of the descendants of family members transported away during the era of the slave trade, but what he finds instead is a very different world and a type of family he is not certain he wants to understand.
Over the River…Life of Lydia Maria Child, Abolitionist for Freedom
- Director: Constance Jackson
- Release Date: 2007
- Production Country: United States
A writer and editor of children's (and other) books in the first half of the 19th century, Lydia Maria Child believed that the first step to equality for all citizens of the United States, including women of all races, was the abolition of slavery. Turning her talents toward that end, she became one of the most effective voices in bringing the issue of slavery and abolition into the forefront of the national debate—much to the dismay of some of her readers.
Prince Among Slaves
- Director: Andrea Kalin, Bill Duke
- Release Date: 2007
- Production Country: United States
On his way home from a military victory, a young Muslim prince is captured by slavers and sold to a cotton plantation in Mississippi. Eventually, friends of his father secure Abdul-Rahman's freedom, but he is on his own when it comes to freeing his wife and nine children, all still enslaved on the same plantation.
Prisoners of a White God
- Director: Steve Lichtag
- Release Date: 2008
- Production Country: Czech Republic
Supposedly seeking to convert the indigenous Akha people to a version of Christianity, evangelical missionaries instead remove children from their families and homes to raise them in "clean" environments. Once there, these children learn about hard labor—on the missionaries' profitable tea plantations—and about service, as they submit to the missionaries' sexual demands or are sold into sexual slavery.
Quilombo
- Director: Carlos Diegues
- Release Date: 1986
- Production Country: Brazil, France
Escaped slaves carve out their own settlement in the mountains of Brazil, led and defended by their anointed leader, Ganga Zumba, and his near-magical army.
Roots
- Director: Marvin J. Chomsky, John Erman , David Greene, Gilbert Moses
- Release Date: 1977
- Production Country: United States
Sold into slavery by rivals within his tribe, young Kunta Kinte survives and eventually submits to his new reality, but he never relinquishes his dream of regaining the freedom of his youth. This dream will fuel four generations of his descendents, who draw strength and hope from it until they, too, can be free people in the land of their birth.
Rough Crossings
- Director: Steve Condie
- Release Date: 2007
- Production Country: United Kingdom
Historian Simon Schama narrates this historical recreation of Colonial slaves who hoped to gain their freedom by fighting for the British during the American Revolution.
Sanshô dayû (Sansho the Bailiff)
- Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
- Release Date: 1954
- Production Country: Japan
Sold into slavery after their high-ranking father is exiled, the daughter and son of an aristocratic family must find a way to survive the horrors of their new life. Holding desperately to her family's ideals, the daughter retains both her hope for a better future and compassion for their fellow slaves—but her brother is convinced that their only real hope for survival is to embrace the brutality and become an overseer so he can inflict the same misery that ruined their lives on his fellow slaves.
Slavery and the Making of America
- Director: Leslie D. Farrell, Chana Gazit, Dante James, Gail Pellett
- Release Date: 2005
- Production Country: United States
Slavery is not simply part of the history of the United States, it was an integral part of the nation's development and increasing wealth.
Slavery and the Making of America
- Director: PBS
- Release Date: 2004
- Production Country: United States
Slavery in the United States has a long and complicated history, with both horrors for the many enslaved and triumphs for those slaves and other early African-American citizens who found ways to break through, including the Black Loyalists—slaves who fought for the British during the American Revolution after being promised freedom by British officers.
Stolen
- Director: Violeta Ayala, Dan Fallshaw
- Release Date: 2009
- Production Country: Australia
Intending to shoot a film about a woman reunited with her family through a U.N. program, two Australians stumble across what seems to be a racially-based system of slavery fully endorsed by the rebel group that governs the camps. When they begin to investigate this discovery, there is an immediate backlash from the rebels and the filmmakers are forced to bury their film in the sand and flee for their lives, hoping that they will be able to retrieve their evidence at some future point.
Trading Women
- Director: David A. Feingold
- Release Date: 2003
- Production Country: United States
Minority tribes in Southeast Asia are one of the primary sources for women and girls who are lured, kidnapped, and, at times, recruited voluntarily into the Thai sex industry. Victims, brothel owners, families, law enforcement personnel, and many others all have stories to tell in order to document the complexities of the trade of women and the sex industry.