Movies: Colonialism

A five-year visual ethnography of traditional yet practical orchestration of Semana Santa in a small town where religious woodcarving is the livelihood. An experiential film on neocolonial Philippines’ interpretation of Saints and Gods through many f...

In between growing frustrations toward cleaning up after an endless parade of tourists and reflections on a traumatizing memory, a voice rises from within a soft-spoken Hawaiian janitor down on the sidewalk in Waikiki. This narrative short film is in...

Opera by Harry Somers portraying Metis leader Louis Riel and his Northwest Rebellion. 1969 CBC-TV production based on the original 1967 opera....

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...

Atikamekw elder Cézar Néwashish continues to recount the history of the community of Manawan that first began in The History of Manawan: Part One. As Christianity and European customs take deeper root in the community – abetted by residential schools...

Imposed under the British colonial rule in 1860, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code criminalise any sexual acts between consenting adults of the same sex, stigmatising them as 'against the order of nature'. On July 2, 2009 the Delhi High Court pass...

The future Edward VIII visits his Empire, with Indian royalty, elephants, palaces and temples....

In New France before the British Conquest, Marie, an indigenous slave, serves the local surgeon. Her daily life of household chores is bleak and alienating. The encounter with a young girl she presumes to be her child will give her motivation to unde...

Two tons of snow—flown from New Hampshire to Puerto Rico in 1952 in order to “gift” Puerto Ricans a “white Christmas”—become a metaphor for the colonialist paternalism of America’s relationship to Puerto Rico....

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 re...

In this animated short, a self-important colonial explorer emerges from a sailing ship and plants a flag on the Arctic ice, as a bemused Inuit hunter looks on. Then the explorer plants another, and another, and another, while the hunter, clearly not ...

In the Bernese Alps, the Agassizhorn peak memorialises Louis Agassiz – a controversial 19th-century scientist, who not only named the mountain after himself, but who claimed he had discovered the Ice Age and went on to become one of the century's mos...

In 1896, Ethiopia, an African nation, largely armed with spears and knives, defeats a well-equipped and organized Italian military bent on colonization....

Made from reimagined/recycled images and sounds from the filmmaker’s archive and other found materials, Undercurrents is a poetic essay documentary about the undercurrents of history playing out in the present. It is also (at its heart) about the pow...

A Maasai human rights lawyer fights to stop the evictions of his people from their homelands in Tanzania. On the outskirts of Serengeti National Park in East Africa, Maasai face eviction from their land to make way for international tourism and hunt...

Venezuelan adaptation of The Four Featehr by A.E.W. Mason. A story of courage and redemption set in the British Empire's colonial era. When Harry Feversham resigns from his military post before a Sudan campaign, he's branded a coward and given four w...

The future Edward VIII enjoys a stately procession and visits the Taj Mahal before meeting senior Indian royalty....

A short film created (and narrated) in 1985 by Québécois director Pierre Falardeau. It compares English rule in Ghana with Canadian dominance in Quebec by showing the 200th anniversary celebration of the Beaver Club of Montreal....

Armoured elephants, sacred monkeys and a camel carriage from Rajasthan....

"In Jan Carew’s explosive drama, Sammy Davis Jr gives a memorable performance as a proud but disillusioned revolutionary who aims to destroy the remnants of white colonial rule in a new African nation. The political themes explored remain incredibly ...