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Subject: Post-Colonial

Former colonies (re)create their own identities, working to erase the colonial presence in their past and create a future exclusive of colonial power.

500 Years Later

  • Director: Owen 'Alik Shahadah
  • Release Date: 2005
  • Production Country: United Kingdom, United States

The people of Africa, scattered all over the globe after 500 years of colonial and imperial encounters, struggle still for equality in education, in opportunity, in prosperity. This is their story.

Bamako

  • Director: Abderrahmane Sissako
  • Release Date: 2006
  • Production Country: Mali, United States, France

Chaka cannot find work, while his wife Mele is employed as a lounge singer, but their situation is just like that of the rest of Africa: many unemployed and others relegated to the tourism industry while rich foreign powers make off with the real money and jobs. Then, one day, a trial begins in the courtyard of the crowded home they share with several other families, and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are finally called to answer for their crimes—if only it will be enough to save Mele and Chaka's marriage, too.

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.

Cartouches Gauloises (Summer of '62)

  • Director: Mehdi Charef
  • Release Date: 2007
  • Production Country: France, Algeria

Eleven-year-old Ali and his friends, both French and Algerian, watch as France withdraws from Algeria at the end of the war.

Earth

  • Director: Deepa Mehta
  • Release Date: 1998
  • Production Country: India, Canada

In 1947, Lahore is a thriving cosmopolitan city, where people of many cultures and faiths live and work side-by-side, including Lenny, a young Parsi (Zorastrian) girl crippled by polio, and her Hindu ayah, Shanta, who is being courted by two different Muslim men in her own neighborhood. But when the formation of Pakistan is announced, many friends and neighbors find themselves suddenly separated by religion and politics, with Lenny and Shanta caught up in the chaos and violence of a city wracked by the throes of partition.

Exodus

  • Director: Otto Preminger
  • Release Date: 1960
  • Production Country: United States

After decades of work and hope, a Jewish state appears to be on the way to becoming a reality. But hope for a peaceful birth for the nation is quickly lost in a rising tide of sectarian violence between militants Jews and Arabs. All the while, thousands of Holocaust survivors, desperate to create a home of their own away from the terrors of World War II Europe, are placing even greater pressure on statesmen and militants alike.

Harkis

  • Director: Alain Tasma
  • Release Date: 2006
  • Production Country: France

An Arabic family that fought for the French in the Algerian War faces discrimination after they immigrate to France.

In Darkest Hollywood: Cinema and Apartheid

  • Director: Peter Davis, Daniel Riesenfeld
  • Release Date: 1993
  • Production Country: Canada, United States

Hollywood movies were an indelible part of South African culture, simplifying the labyrinthine culture of apartheid into an equation of black and white. As well, South Africans took to heart the portrayals of gangsters and filmic fantasies, reinterpreting them in ways that helped them deal with the culture of doublethink... until, at last, South Africa began to develop its own film industry.

Jinnah

  • Director: Jamil Dehlavi
  • Release Date: 1998
  • Production Country: United Kingdom, Pakistan

Fearful of the fate for the Muslim minority in a Hindu majority democracy, Islamic statesman Muhammed Ali Jinnah fights for a second nation to be created as a Muslim majority state when the British withdraw from India. As the dramatic events unfold in the lead up to the Partition of India, Jinnah's own life is examined—including his youth, his marriage to a Zoroastrian woman, and his final years sacrificing his own health to ensure the success of his new nation, Pakistan.

Journey from the Fall

  • Director: Ham Tran
  • Release Date: 2006
  • Production Country: United States

When her husband, Long, is imprisoned in a Communist reeducation camp, Mai and her small family flee Vietnam by boat, hoping to find refuge in the the United States. Years later, Mai struggles to care for her family, alone in a new land but never giving up the hope that she will find a way to contact her husband so that he can somehow join them. However, after years with no word of his family, Long has lost hope, believing that they did not survive the arduous journey on the open seas.

La Noire de... (Black Girl)

  • Director: Ousmane Sembene
  • Release Date: 1966
  • Production Country: France, Senegal

Hired as a nanny by a French couple in Senegal, Diouana is happy to return to France with them, looking forward to a more exciting and cosmopolitan lifestyle. But, upon their arrival in France, Diouana is reduced to being merely another servant and her African origins bring scorn and derision from the local community, leading Diouana to decide that there is no hope and no place for her, anywhere.

Last Stand at Little Big Horn: Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse Battle Custer

  • Director: Paul Stekler
  • Release Date: 1992
  • Production Country: United States

Native American survivor accounts provide the basis for this reexamination of the history and mythology surrounding the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

LBJ

  • Director: Santiago Álvarez
  • Release Date: 1968
  • Production Country: Cuba

Newsreels from the United States have been assembled by a Cuban filmmaker into a montage documenting the life and times of U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Life, Above All

  • Director: Oliver Schmitz
  • Release Date: 2010
  • Production Country: South Africa, Germany

When Chandra's village attempts to exile her mother for fear she has AIDS, Chandra brings her mother home, forcing the community to acknowledge that their tradition of shaming and shunning victims to remove the "infection" from their midst has not prevented the spread of this disease... but getting them to actually change their ways is a far more difficult task.

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.

Muriel ou le Temps d'un retour (Muriel, or the Time of a Return)

  • Director: Alain Resnais
  • Release Date: 1962
  • Production Country: France, Italy

Just after the Algerian War, four people in Bolougne must reconcile with their pasts and decide their futures at the time that France must do the same.

Now

  • Director: Santiago Álvarez
  • Release Date: 1965
  • Production Country: Cuba

Newsreel montages from the United States show the often repressive reactions of government and other officials to the Civil Rights movement, accompanied by Lena Horne singing 'Now,' a song banned on many radio stations in the United States.

Samt el qusur (The Silences of the Palace)

  • Director: Moufida Tlatli
  • Release Date: 1994
  • Production Country: France, Tunisia

In post-colonial Tunisia, a young woman comes to grips with the realities of her mother's life as a servant in a prince's palace.

Tsotsi (Thug)

  • Director: Gavin Hood
  • Release Date: 2005
  • Production Country: United Kingdom, South Africa

Upset about a fight with his gang during which he shot a friend, Tsotsi carjacks a young woman and shoots her before taking off in her car, not realizing until it is too late that her baby is in the back seat. For the next week, Tsotsi attempts to care for both the baby and his injured friend, but the realities of life on the streets and his history of crime frustrate his efforts. In the end, the baby's fate will decide Tsotsi's own fate.

Xala (Impotence)

  • Director: Ousmane Sembene
  • Release Date: 1975
  • Production Country: Senegal

Taking a third wife in celebration of his new prosperity, the leader of a newly freed African country finds himself struck with impotence on his wedding night, leading him to seek answers to key questions: who has cursed him, and why?