Bringing theory and practice together, African Cinema and Human Rights argues that moving images have a significant role to play in advancing the causes of justice and fairness. The contributors to this volume identify three key ways in which film can achieve these goals: documenting human rights abuses and thereby supporting the claims of victims and goals of truth and reconciliation within larger communities; legitimating, and consequently solidifying, an expanded scope for human rights; and promoting the realization of social and economic rights. Including the voices of African scholars, scholar-filmmakers, African directors Jean-Marie Teno and Gaston Kaboré, and researchers whose work focuses on transnational cinema, this volume explores overall perspectives, and differences of perspective, pertaining to Africa, human rights, and human rights filmmaking alongside specific case studies of individual films and areas of human rights violations. With its interdisciplinary scope, attention to practitioners' self-understandings, broad perspectives, and particular case studies, African Cinema and Human Rights is a foundational text that offers questions, reflections, and evidence that help us to consider film's ideal role within the context of our ever-continuing struggle towards a more just global society.
Author(s): Mette Hjort, Eva Jørholt
Series: Studies in the Cinema of the Black Diaspora
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 320
City: Bloomington
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Filmmaking on the African Continent: On the Centrality of Human Rights Thinking
Part I: Perspectives
1. Human Rights, Africa, and Film: A Cautionary Tale
2. African Cinema: Perspective Correction
3. Africa’s Gift to the World: An Interview with Gaston Kaboré
4. Toward New African Languages of Protest: African Documentary Films and Human Rights
5. Challenging Perspectives: An Interview with Jean-Marie Teno
6. In Defense of Human Rights Filmmaking: A Response to the Skeptics, Based on Kenyan Examples
7. The Zanzibar International Film Festival and Its Children Panorama: Using Films to Socialize Human Rights into the Educational Sector and a Wider Public Sphere
Part II: Cases
8. Ousmane Sembène’s Moolaadé: Peoples’ Rights vs. Human Rights
9. Haile Gerima’s Harvest: 3000 Years in the Context of an Evolving Language of Human Rights
10. Abducted Twice? Difret (2015) and Schoolgirl Killer (1999)
11. Timbuktu and “L’homme de haine”
12. Beats of the Antonov: A Counternarrative of Endurance and Survival
13. Human Rights Issues in the Nigerian Films October 1 and Black November
14. The Antiecstasy of Human Rights: A Foray into Queer Cinema on “Homophobic Africa”
15. Refugees from Globalization: “Clandestine” African Migration to Europe in a Human (Rights) Perspective
Index
