This is the definitive visual record of the rise and fall of Joseph Désiré Mobutu, ruler of Zaire (the Congo) for over 30 years. Drawing upon 140 hours of rare archival material found in Kinshasa, and 50 hours of interviews with those once close to him, Mobutu, King of Zaire tells the story of the man at the heart of Central Africa’s post-colonial history.
Category: Politics
The film surreally describes the dynamics of the acquisition of power in the various historical periods, from prehistory to consumerism in contemporary Italy, passing through the Roman Empire, the conquest of the West at the expense of the native Indians, the fascist twenty years. The various scenes are commented by three beasts, a lion, a tiger and a leopard, representing military power, economic power, and agricultural power respectively.
In the village of Tankuy, farmers are roused to revolutionary action against US based imperialism after one of them, an indigenous man, is brutalized by a landowner. Native non professionals contributed to and helped direct this example of radical, collective oriented Latin American filmmaking.
The Hunters, a thematic epilogue to the historical trilogy that centers on a group of middle-aged hunters who discover the perfectly preserved, 30 year-old frozen remains of a partisan (bearing an uncoincidental resemblance to the Byzantine image of Jesus Christ) and, compelled to deliberate on its ‘proper’ disposition, spend a haunted, restless evening confronting their past. Set in post-junta era Greece, the film is a contemporary allegory on the nation’s deliberate suppression of painful and unflattering history and collective deflection of personal accountability.
This film focuses on the experiences of African-American students at Yale in the early 1970s. The influential documentary short follows students Erroll McDonald and Eugene Rivers, and features a conversation with civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael.
The brothers Santos and Rufino Peralta are used like animals in the workplace at the Parana Stop. There they encounter enormous hardship and inhuman conditions of work as a consequence of the immense greed of the managers. A worker’s rebellion is maturing, to the point that it is developed into trade union of workers who respond against their grief. Finally, the workers plot a counterattack and punish their corrupt employers.
A journalist is preparing a story on extremist youth and falls in love with a young radical who fears being killed by his companions when he is unable to commit a political assassination.