Nearly a decade after his last film, Sembène directs here the first of a planned trilogy about the daily heroism of the African woman. Faat Kiné is a single mum in a modern Dakar, full of contradictions and hopes of change. She lives with her two children, of two ex-husbands, having to deal not only with the social pressure of her condition, but also fight for the professional goals in a world dominated by the patriarchal condition.
This film is not in English and does not have subtitles in English.
Maybe Sembène’s masterpiece and one of cinema’s most intense condemnations of colonialism. At the end of WWII, Senegalese soldiers are coming home from Europe and placed in Thiaroye’s military camp. Given the poor conditions they are kept and also the cut in severance pay, the soldiers revolt. The tragedy happens with their massacre at the hands of the French army. Winner of the jury special grand prize in Venice.
This film is not in English and does not have subtitles in English.
Ceddo is the name for the last holders of African spiritualism before the arrival of Islam and Christianity. Set in a Senegalese village in the XVII century, The king Demba War sides with the Islamic leader. The ceddo organise and kidnap his daughter in order to prevent forced religious conversion. This “micro epic”, as it has been described, was censured and, so the story goes, Sembène used to distribute fliers at film theatres describing the removed scenes.
This film is not in English and does not have subtitles in English.
The filmmakers couple, founders of the militant collective Class Cinema Collective, analyses in this film-essay the role of the press in the Spanish dictatorship in the 70’s. A fight for the control of information and the need to find trustworthy sources.
This film is not in English and does not have subtitles in English.
After being accused of attempted murder, Eldrige Cleaver, militant of the Black Panther Party, is exiled in Algeria. The director and photographer William Klein will make a portrait of a multifaceted man, listening to his activist discourse on revolution, on the American struggle, his own political rivals such as Nixon or Reagan. But this is also a film that goes beyond ideology, a portrait of a romantic revolutionary, in a lyric and moving exile.
It was when studying in UCLA that Luart and some colleagues decided to do this documentary. At its centre we find the philosopher Angela Davis, someone connected to the American Communist Party, to the Black Panthers and an activist for women’s rights and against racial discrimination. We follow her private life as well as political career, in a portrait that became a true revolutionary manifest.
