| January 20 |
Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death
Director: Peter Bate
(100 minutes, 2004, Belgium/UK, in English, French and Dutch with English subtitles)
This true, shocking, astonishing story of what the Belgians did in the Congo was forgotten for over 50 years. The film describes Leopold II, King of the Belgium’s private colony of the Congo between 1885 and 1908 as a gulag labor camp of shocking brutality. Leopold posed as the protector of Africans fleeing Arab slave-traders but, in reality, he carved out an empire based on terror to harvest rubber. Families were held as hostages, starving to death if the men failed to produce enough wild rubber. Children’s hands were chopped off as punishment for late deliveries. The Belgian government has denounced this documentary as a “tendentious diatribe” for depicting King Leopold II as the moral forebear of Adolf Hitler, responsible for the death of 10 million people in his rapacious exploitation of the Congo. Yet, it is agreed today that the first Human Rights movement was spurred by what happened in the Congo.
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February 10 |
Moolaadé
Director: Ousmane Sembene
(124 minutes, 2004, Senegal, in Bambara and French with English subtitles)
Moolaadé, set in a small village, four young girls facing ritual “purification” flee to the household of Collé Ardo Gallo Sy, a strong-willed woman who has managed to shield her own teenage daughter from mutilation. Collé invokes the time-honored custom of moolaadé (sanctuary) to protect the fugitives. Tension mounts as the ensuing stand-off pits Collé against village traditionalists (both male and female) endangering her daughter’s prospective marriage to the heir-apparent to the throne.
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| February 17 |
Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North
Producer/Director: Katrina Browne
(86 minutes, 2008, Ghana/Cuba/USA, in English)
Katrina Browne uncovers her New England family’s deep involvement in the Triangle Trade and, in so doing, reveals the pivotal role slavery played in the growth of the whole American economy. In this bicentennial year of the federal abolition of the slave trade, this courageous documentary asks every American what we can and should do to repair the unacknowledged damage of our troubled past. This film explains how the New England slave trade supported not just its merchants but banks, insurers, shipbuilders, outfitters and provisioners, rich and poor. Ordinary citizens bought shares in slave ships. Northern textile mills spun cotton picked by slaves, fueling the Industrial Revolution, and creating the economy that attracted generations of immigrants.
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March 31 |
The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo
Director: Lisa F. Jackson
(76 minutes, 2007, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), in French, Swahili, Lingala, and Mashi with English
subtitles)
This extraordinary film, “The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo,” shot in the war zones of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), shatters the silence that surrounds the use of sexual violence as a weapon of conflict. Many tens of thousands of women and girls have been systematically kidnapped, raped, mutilated and tortured by soldiers from both foreign militias and the Congolese army. A survivor of gang rape herself, Emmy Award®-winning filmmaker Lisa F. Jackson travels through the DRC to understand what is happening and why.
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April 14 |
Bamako
Director: Abderrahmane Sissako
(118 minutes, 2006, Mali, in French and Bambara with English subtitles)
An historic trial is taking place in a residential courtyard in Bamako, the capital city of Mali. African citizens have taken proceedings against such international financial institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), whom civil society blames for perpetuating Africa’s debt crisis, at the hearing of so many of the continent’s woes. As numerous trial witnesses (school teachers, farmers, writers, etc.) air bracing indictments against the global economic machinery that haunts them, life in the courtyard presses forward. Melé and her unemployed husband Chaka are on the verge of breaking up; a security guard’s gun goes missing; a young man lies ill; a wedding procession passes through; and women keep everything rolling -- dyeing fabric, minding children, spinning cotton, and speaking their minds.
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| Films screenings are at 7 pm in the
Luce Hall Auditorium, 34 Hillhouse Avenue.
Admission is free and open to the public.
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