Ships, seas, power - beginning of globalization (2025)

Statues Also Die

Commissioned by the journal Présence Africaine, this short documentary examines how African art is devalued and alienated through colonial and museum contexts. Beginning with the question of why African works are confined to ethnographic displays while Greek or Egyptian art is celebrated, the film became a landmark of anti-colonial cinema and was banned in France for eight years.

The Last of the Mohicans

In war-torn colonial America, in the midst of a bloody battle between British, the French and Native American allies, the aristocratic daughter of a British Colonel and her party are captured by a group of Huron warriors. Fortunately, a group of three Mohican trappers comes to their rescue.

Rabbit-Proof Fence

In 1931, three Aboriginal girls escape after being plucked from their homes to be trained as domestic staff, and set off on a trek across the Outback.

The Ghost and the Darkness

Sir Robert Beaumont is behind schedule on a railroad in Africa. Enlisting noted engineer John Henry Patterson to right the ship, Beaumont expects results. Everything seems great until the crew discovers the mutilated corpse of the project's foreman, seemingly killed by a lion. After several more attacks, Patterson calls in famed hunter Charles Remington, who has finally met his match in the bloodthirsty lions.

Dawn of the Damned

This excellent feature-length documentary - the story of the imperialist colonization of Africa - is a film about death. Its most shocking sequences derive from the captured French film archives in Algeria containing - unbelievably - masses of French-shot documentary footage of their tortures, massacres and executions of Algerians. The real death of children, passers-by, resistance fighters, one after the other, becomes unbearable. Rather than be blatant propaganda, the film convinces entirely by its visual evidence, constituting an object lesson for revolutionary cinema.

Le Normandie, un géant à la française

Plot unavailable

The New World

A drama about explorer John Smith and the clash between Native Americans and English settlers in the 17th century.

Portugal: Carnations Against Dictatorship

In Portugal, during the night of April 24-25, 1974, a peaceful uprising put an end to the last government of the Estado Novo, the authoritarian regime established in 1933 by dictator António de Oliveira Salazar (1889-1970), paving the way for full democracy: a chronicle of the Carnation Revolution.

Max Havelaar: or, The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company

An idealistic Dutch colonial officer posted to Indonesia in the 19th century is cohvinced that he can make the kinds of changes that will actually help the local people he is in charge of, but circumstances soon make him realize just how out of touch he really is, and it doesn't take long for things to go from bad to worse.

The Trader

A traveling trader provides a window into rural life in the Republic of Georgia, where potatoes are currency and ambition is crushed by poverty.

Hymn from the Hive

A house. A shelter. A man the last one left in the homeland. A woman returns to her community every year. The daughters and husband who have lost all traditions. A rapper who raps in the old language. In 1990 Susanna marries Udo. Their wedding is the last one celebrated between two Saxons in their village. After that the couple emigrated like half a million of Transylvanian Saxons. After 30 years in Germany the relationship between Susi and Udo has gone stale and they haven't taught their native language to their daughters that feel just German. Georg on the other hand is proud of his identity. He hopes with his rap to spread the young generations about the heritage to make them proud of being a Saxon. This is the choral story of a family who is learning to change in order not to disappear.

Big Rig

Big Rig (2008) is a documentary film by Doug Pray about long-haul truck drivers. The film consists of a series of interviews with different drivers, focusing on both their personal life stories and also the life and culture of truck drivers in the United States.

Zulu Dawn

In 1879, the British suffer a great loss at the Battle of Isandlwana due to incompetent leadership.

The Wind and the Lion

At the beginning of the 20th century an American woman is abducted in Morocco by Berbers, and the attempts to free her range from diplomatic pressure to military intervention.

Fadhma N'Soumer

This film, is about the courage and the determination of a young woman in djurdjur"as mountain in Algeria, fighting for her ancestor land during the earlier years of french occupation.

The End Of The Line: Rochester's Subway

"The End of the Line - Rochester's Subway" tells the little-known story of the rail line that operated in a former section of the Erie Canal from 1927 until its abandonment in 1956. Produced in 1994 by filmmakers Fredrick Armstrong and James P. Harte, the forty-five minute documentary recounts the tale of an American city's bumpy ride through the Twentieth Century, from the perspective of a little engine that could, but didn't. The film has since been rereleased (2005) and now contains the main feature with special portions that were added as part of the rereleased version. These include a look at the only surviving subway car from the lines and a Phantom tun through the tunnels in their abandoned state, among others, for a total of 90 minutes of unique and well preserved historical information.

Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India

The year is 1893 and India is under British occupation. In a small village, the tyrannical Captain Russell has imposed an unprecedented land tax on its citizens. Outraged, Bhuvan, a rebellious farmer, rallies the villagers to publicly oppose the tax. Russell offers a novel way to settle the dispute: he challenges Bhuvan and his men to a game of cricket, a sport completely foreign to India. If Bhuvan and his men can defeat Russell's team, the tax will be repealed.

Palm Trees in the Snow

Spain, 2003. An accidental discovery leads Clarence to travel from the snowy mountains of Huesca to Equatorial Guinea, to visit the land where her father Jacobo and her uncle Kilian spent most of their youth, the island of Fernando Poo.

Noua

In Algeria in 1954, in a village in the Aurès region, poverty reigns over peasants enslaved by colonial administrators and Algerian landowners. Noua, in love with the son of a peasant dispossessed of his land, must be sold to a wealthy landowner.

The Writer from a Country Without Bookstores

The ruthless dictator Teodoro Obiang has ruled Equatorial Guinea with an iron hand since 1979. Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel is the most translated Equatoguinean writer, but he had to flee the country in 2011, after starting a hunger strike denouncing the crimes of the dictatorship. Since then, he has lived in Spain, feeling that, despite the risks, he must return and fight the monster with words.

Pensionnats catholiques de Guyane, la blessure

Plot unavailable

Burn!

The professional mercenary Sir William Walker instigates a slave revolt on the Caribbean island of Queimada in order to help improve the British sugar trade. Years later he is sent again to deal with the same rebels that he built up because they have seized too much power that now threatens British sugar interests.

Eyewar

What threads of history bind Manhattan's Ground Zero to those of Nagasaki and Hiroshima? Or connect sight to truth, games to war, or the silkworm to the drone? What does the United States hold to be the role of science in warfare? How has war historically been waged in Buddhist traditions? These are some of the topics addressed in Eyewar: 80 minutes of found footage which traces the development of the digital image from the maps of the second century to the screens of the twenty-first, and the uses of the field of cybernetics from Japan in the 1940s to Chile in the 1970s and Iraq in the 1990s.

This Magnificent Cake!

In 1885, Africa is a succulent cake destined to be wildly divided and everyone wants a piece. A disturbed European king, a Pygmy working in a luxury hotel, a successful but lonely businessman, an enslaved porter, a young army deserter, a ghostly clarinetist. Some benefit from colonialism and greed. Others suffer racism and violence.

And the Dogs Were Silent

For 'Et les chiens se taisaient' Maldoror adapted a piece of theatre by the poet and politician Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), about a rebel who becomes profoundly aware of his otherness when condemned to death. His existential dialogue with his mother reverberates around the African sculptures on display at the Musée de l'Homme, a Parisian museum full of colonial plunder whose director was the Surrealist anthropologist Michel Leiris.

The Pearl Button

The ocean contains the history of all humanity. The sea holds all the voices of the earth and those that come from outer space. Water receives impetus from the stars and transmits it to living creatures. Water, the longest border in Chile, also holds the secret of two mysterious buttons which were found on its ocean floor. Chile, with its 2,670 miles of coastline and the largest archipelago in the world, presents a supernatural landscape. In it are volcanoes, mountains and glaciers. In it are the voices of the Patagonian Indigenous people, the first English sailors and also those of its political prisoners. Some say that water has memory. This film shows that it also has a voice.

Cotton Road

What does a rural town in South Carolina have to do with China? Americans consume nearly twenty billion new items of clothing each year, and at least one billion of them are made in China. Cotton Road uncovers the transnational movement of cotton and tells the stories of workers lives in a conventional cotton supply chain. From rural farms in South Carolina to factory cities in China, we span the globe to encounter the industrial processes behind our rapacious consumption of cheap clothing and textile products. Are we connected to one another through the things we consume? Cotton Road explores a contemporary landscape of globalized labor through human stories and provides an opportunity to reflect on the ways our consumption impacts others and drives a global economy.

Africa Blood and Guts

A chronicle of the violence that occurred in much of the African continent throughout the 1960s. As many African countries were transitioning from colonial rule to other forms of government, violent political upheavals were frequent. Revolutions in Zanzibar and Kenya in which thousands were killed are shown, the violence not only political; there is also extensive footage of hunters and poachers slaughtering different types of wild animals.

Black Venus

The true story of Saartje Baartman, a black South African worker who moves to London with her master in the early 19th century. Although she dreams of being an artist, once in Europe she is exploited as a sideshow attraction due to her large buttocks and genitalia.

Afrique-France : le divorce ?

At a time when French flags are being burned and French embassies targeted, this documentary delves into the growing disaffection between French-speaking Africa and the former colonial power. Through the voices of African leaders, pan-African activists, and committed young people, the film questions the persistence of a relationship marked by the aftermath of colonization, the opaque agreements of "Françafrique," and a military presence deemed paternalistic.

Snow Warrior

Snow Warrior is a love letter to the splendour of winter. It captures the beauty of a northern city through the eyes of a bicycle courier named Mariah.

Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death

This true, astonishing story describes how King Leopold II of Belgium turned Congo into its private colony between 1885 and 1908. Under his control, Congo became 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.

The Great White of Lambarene

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), the mission doctor, theologian and philosopher who founded a hospital in the rainforests of Gabon, achieved sainthood in his lifetime, at least in the popular imagination. The critical assessment of his life and works in recent years, however, has been slightly more ambivalent. Ba Kobhio Bassek is the first director to examine this medical missionary from a purely African point-of-view.

Invasion

In this era of “reconciliation”, Indigenous land is still being taken at gunpoint. Unist’ot’en Camp, Gidimt’en checkpoint and the larger Wet’suwet’en Nation are standing up to the Canadian government and corporations who continue colonial violence against Indigenous people. The Unist’ot’en Camp has been a beacon of resistance for nearly 10 years. It is a healing space for Indigenous people and settlers alike, and an active example of decolonization. The violence, environmental destruction, and disregard for human rights following TC Energy (formerly TransCanada) / Coastal GasLink’s interim injunction has been devastating to bear, but this fight is far from over.

CARA-B

A desktop documentary that focuses on the Golden Record that NASA sent into space in the late 1970s. The piece reflects on issues such as the power of scientific discourse to produce revisions of the world, the evolution of the concept of the archive and the resignification of borders in the rhetoric of space colonialism.

The Great Indian Wars 1840-1890

Documentation of the encroachment of European settlers upon Native American lands and the violent reaction of the Indians in their struggle to survive.