Filmmaker Richard Pakleppa talks about 'Paths to Freedom'

No easy stroll to freedom for SA poetry's restless howler

Miles Keylock, Mail & Guardian

Lesego Rampolokeng

‘Knock & lock-down phoney miracle politic-crony-oracles/ *most beloved for ‘suicide on the rail tracks’/ trains run through the flesh here/ travel not far for head-slices and skin-pieces,” writes Lesego Rampolokeng at the start of his anthology Head on Fire: Rants/Notes/Poems 2001 to 2011. Lines like this have earned the Soweto-born poet a reputation for being difficult and abstruse, “a tough chew” as Kwanele Sosibo wrote in his 2012 review of the anthology.

Yet to read Rampolokeng’s “ideological militancy” and disillusionment with the contemporary “rainbow fable” as simply “unrelenting desolation” (Sosibo again) is to overlook that deep humanity, self-reflexive irony and wicked humour that has characterised his poetry since his first “ranthology”, 1990’s Horns for Hondo.

Miners Shot Down

Concerning Fanon

Bhakti Shringarpure

Bhakti Shringarpure, Warscapes

Concerning Violence, a documentary by Swedish filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson, opened to a packed theatre at the Sydney Film Festival last week, and despite being a powerful film, it did not close to the enthusiastic cheers and applause that other films had. Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, scholar of postcolonial studies and a legend in her own right, offers a monotone introduction to the film. Spivak's short lecture on Martinican psychiatrist and anticolonial thinker Frantz Fanon appropriately ushers viewers into the universe of this documentary, which is decidedly academic, theoretical, pedagogical and, to some degree, experimental.

Miners Shot Down: Grahamstown Screening

12 Years a Slave: A view from the Other South

Litheko Modisane, Africa is a Country

A grossly detestable subjection of one human being by another, slavery was a structural guarantor of white control of blacks in the Americas. It was to whites in that part of the world and other parts of the world including the Cape Colony in South Africa, what colonial subjugation and apartheid would later be to whites in the rest of Africa. There is no longer slavery in the Americas. However, white supremacy is still around, not only in the United States but also in many recently colonized societies. On what structural ropes then does white supremacy hang today? Even then, does it still need an institutional apparatus of dominance for its continuity?

An Evening With Film Maker Estele Bravo

MANDELA AND FIDEL / SOUTH AFRICA AND CUBA: AN EVENING WITH FILM MAKER ESTELA BRAVO (Wed, 26 February, 6.30pm - Barratt One)

The Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER), School of Journalism and Media Studies, and the International Office cordially invite you to a screening of two documentaries by acclaimed American documentary film-maker Estela Bravo.  We are privileged to have Estela Bravo introduce and discuss the documentaries with us at the screening.

"MANDELA AND FIDEL" (2013, 30 min) recounts the friendship of ex-president Nelson Mandela with Fidel Castro of Cuba. Based on the unique access Estela Bravo gained to both men, she explores the source of their friendship in the context of the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa.

"AFTER THE BATTLE" (1991, 58 min) movingly recounts the stories of Cuban, South African, and Angolan soldiers who participated in the epic battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola in 1987. What was the motivation, and what was the outcome, for the ones who took part in the conflict, and for their families? Those who fought answer these questions. Filmed on location in South Africa, Angola, Namibia and Cuba, Bravo's documentary examines the politics and human consequences of the war from all sides. It features remarkable footage, archival material, and interviews with Cuban and South African soldiers, as well as the grieving families of those who were killed in the war.

Dear Mandela (full documentary now online)

Trailer for 'Concerning Violence'

Lewis Gordon on 12 Years a Slave

Dell'arte della guerra (On the Art of War): Film Screening, Eden Grove Blue, 18h45, Thursday 26 September

Margherita diPaola, the director, will be in attendance.

'Black Power Mixtape' Director Will Tackle Struggle For Liberation via Frantz Fanon In Next Film

Tambay A. Obenson, Indiewire

After attempting to contextualize the Black Power Movement, in a format more accessible to a new generation - what we call a "mixtape" hence the title, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 - Swedish director Goran Hugo Olsson will continue on that same path, in a similar style, with his next film, revealed over the weekend.

Olsson will incorporate the words from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth in a new documentary project that will also use newly-discovered archive footage (as was the case with his last film), to explore what he refers to as "the most daring moments in the struggle for liberation in the Third World, illuminating the neocolonialism happening today, as well as the unrest and the reaction against it."

La Commune (Paris, 1871)

Django Unchained, or, The Help: How “Cultural Politics” Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why

Adolph Reed, Jr.

by Adolph Reed, Jr., Nonsite.org

Django Unchained, or The Help

On reflection, it’s possible to see that Django Unchained and The Help are basically different versions of the same movie. Both dissolve political economy and social relations into individual quests and interpersonal transactions and thus effectively sanitize, respectively, slavery and Jim Crow by dehistoricizing them. The problem is not so much that each film invents cartoonish fictions; it’s that the point of the cartoons is to take the place of the actual relations of exploitation that anchored the regime it depicts. In The Help the buffoonishly bigoted housewife, Hilly, obsessively pushes a pet bill that would require employers of black domestic servants to provide separate, Jim Crow toilets for them; in Django Unchained the sensibility of 1970s blaxploitation imagines “comfort girls” and “Mandingo fighters” as representative slave job descriptions. It’s as if Jim Crow had nothing to do with cheap labor and slavery had nothing to do with making slave owners rich. And the point here is not just that they get the past wrong—it’s that the particular way they get it wrong enables them to get the present just as wrong and so their politics are as misbegotten as their history.

How Mining Companies Steal Africa's Wealth

Ousmane Sembene - Interviews

• Introduction 
• You Look at Us as If We Were Insects (1965)
• For Me, the Cinema Is an Instrument of Political Action, But ... (1969)
• We Are Governed in Black Africa by Colonialism’s Disabled Children (1971)
• Filmmakers Have a Great Responsibility to Our People (1972)
• Ousmane Sembène Interviewed in Munich (1972)
• Ousmane Sembène: An Interview (1972)
• African Cinema Is Not a Cinema of Folklore (1973)
• Interview with Ousmane Sembène (1975)
• Interview with Ousmane Sembène (1976)
• Sembène Ousmane in Kinshasa (1977)
• Interview with Ousmane Sembène (1978)
• In the Name of Tolerance: A Meeting with Ousmane Sembène (1979)
• Samori: The Last Grand Oeuvre of Sembène Ousmane (1986)

Algerian Filmmaker Merzak Allouache Struggles with Censorship After Long Career

By Said Khatibi, Alakhbar

Critically acclaimed Algerian director Merzak Allouache tasted success early in his career, but when he tried confronting controversial subjects in his country he was censored.

Merzak Allouache’s movies are groundbreaking inside and outside of Algeria. He has become known as the voice of the people and a politically engaging film director. He knows how to ride the waves of criticism and win the affection of his audience.

Outside the Law – review

Philip French, The Observer 

The still highly controversial colonial war that France fought in Algeria from the mid-1950s until the granting of independence in 1962 has only been patchily reflected in the cinema. It figures significantly in the background in films as different as Alain Resnais' Muriel and Michael Haneke's Hidden, and in 1966 there was Lost Command, a Hollywood version of Jean Lartéguy's French bestseller The Centurions about a battalion of Indo-China veterans reassembling for another bitter colonial conflict in Algeria. The only truly memorable movie is the Marxist The Battle of Algiers (1966), set in the early days of the revolution, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo and initiated by Yacef Saadi, a leader of the FLN (National Liberation Front). Banned in France for several years and regarded as one of the greatest political movies ever made, The Battle of Algiers was shown by the Pentagon to all senior officers and civil advisers going to Iraq and Afghanistan to show "how to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas".

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

Danny Glover's Black Panthers film is an antidote to Batman and Iron Man

Danny Glover's new documentary, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-75, profiles the Black Panthers. 'I'm a child of the civil rights movement,' he says

by  Damon Wise,  The Guardian, Saturday 8 October 2011 

"I think we have to be really observant as consumers," says Danny Glover. "The people we want to be can be reflected in our cultural art, and we can give value to that. We can do that. It can be entertainment – there's nothing wrong with that – but it can be enlightening as well. There is a choice."

Black Panther national chairman Bobby Seale, left, and Huey Newton.