Movies, Videos, and Other Films:

Amistad (Sierra Leone, Atlantic Ocean, & U.S.A.)

Movie Video, 1997.  3 of 4 stars.  155 min.  Historical Drama.  Directed by Steven Spielberg; stars Morgan Freeman and Matthew McConaughey.  

An island off the coast of Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, was the home of the prison holding pen for tens or hundreds of thousands of slaves coming from several different African ports, for transport to the Americas.  This movie details the famous revolt on one of these ships, the Amistad.  Amazon.com review: "Steven Spielberg's most simplistic, sanitized history lesson, Amistad, explores the symbolic 1840s trials of 53 West Africans following their bloody rebellion aboard a slave ship....  At its core, Amistad is a traditional courtroom drama, centered by a tired, clichéd narrative: a struggling, idealistic young lawyer...fighting the crooked political system and saving helpless victims...; here, it seems like a naive view of real, complex history."

Beyond the Gates
Movie Video, 2006, 2.5-3.5 stars.  112 min.  Fiction: Historical Drama.  Stars John Hurt and Hugh Dancy.  (Also known as "Shooting Dogs.") 
A teacher and a Catholic priest in Africa find themselves caught in a heart-wrenching moral dilemma. In 1994, during the Rwandan genocide, the two foreigners must decide if they should stay and try to save as many Tutsis from Hutu killers as they can or if they should stay out of the conflict and flee for their own safety. [The movie is] based on a true story, minimally fictionalized, about the 1994 destruction of 2,500 Tutsi and Tusti-friendly Hutus who sought safety at the Ecole Technique Officelle in Kigali, Rwanda. They were safe for a while, as long as U.N. peace monitors stuck around. But when the situation got too hot, they left, leaving behind the nonwhite refugees who were, in turn, all slaughtered by machete-mad Tutsis....  It'll put you through the wringer; it's moving and wrenching, and there's barely a happy ending. But the stories — even ones like this that are more about the non-Rwandan Europeans than anything else — need to be documented....  David Belton, who co-wrote the script, was a BBC news cameraman who was at the ETC during the siege and evacuated along with the U.N. forces. So it's the story from his outsider perspective. It was shot on location in Kigali at the ETC, the actual spot where the attack took place. But if you watch the closing credits, you'll see people of who worked on the film as extras or as crew members who were either there or who had lost people (some of them the lone survivors in their families) in the genocide.   --Review by Dave White at http://movies.go.com.

Blood Diamond (USA)--fiction

Movie Video, 2006, 2.5-3.5 stars.  143 min.  Fiction: Historical Drama.  Stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Amajou Hansou, and Jennifer Connally.   "Blood diamonds" are diamonds purchased for or with money or armaments by rebels using them in violent conflicts.  Historically, they are a late-20th century phenomenon in countries such as Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Congo, and elsewhere, where they have funded perhaps as much as one billion dollars of armaments for rebels who maim and kill recklessly. 

         The movie Blood Diamond is about one such diamond found in Sierra Leone.  The main character, a white man (Leonardo DiCaprio) from a highly dysfunctional South African family, acts as a sort of dark version of Indiana Jones in trying to take it from the Sierra Leonean who has found it, thus enabling himself--and his rich, diamond-company patron to become even more wealthy.

       Nationally, some critics have praised this movie highly, and in fact Leonardo DeCaprio received an Oscar for this acting in this film.  However, other critics have panned it.  This bifurcation has occurred among audiences, too: some are spellbound by the story while others laugh at the violence at inappropriate times.  Part of the problem may be that the violence is so unusual that students think of it as ridiculously overdramatized; another problem may be that the movie has such an historical sweep that watcher may have difficulty understanding or following the broad storyline or may find it boring.  However, once you realize that all the violence depicted actually is underplayed, compared to the real thing--and once you know even a little about the background of African war and/or "blood diamonds"--the movie becomes a powerful and very realistic depiction of an important part of recent history in West Africa.  The movie shows how the trade of rough diamonds from Sierra Leone, West Africa, which produces about 3% of the world's diamonds, contributed substantially to that country's terrible civil war in the 1990s.  The film is set in 1999 and starts with extreme, gruesome violence of the kind that receives "X" ratings in Europe (but only "R" ratings in the U.S.).  It shows, in detail, villagers getting their hands and arms chopped off and young children operating AK-47 machine guns.  The story line features a simple villager (Amajou Hansou) who, when forced by the rebel army to dig for diamonds, finds a diamond of great value.  In order to save his family, he tries to smuggle the gem out of the country with the help of a European diamond smuggler (Leonardo DiCaprio).  

       The movie clearly is an action film.  Its violent scenes accurately reflect individual and journalistic accounts of Sierra Leone's lengthy civil war--and the brutal wars in many other third-world countries since the advent on the gun market of cheap, light, plentiful, and easy-to-use machine guns and other weapons of wars after the dismantling of the Soviet Union.  The international diamond trade has since made trading in "blood diamonds" harder by instituting the Kimberly Process Certification program, but some such trade still exists--estimates range from 1-5%--and, more importantly, violence like that shown in the movie continues on in other third-world countries every day, often fueled by other rich--if less flashy--resources.

        A good companion film to watch is the History Channel's 100 min. documentary Blood Diamonds--see below.

Blood Diamonds (USA)--nonfiction
History Channel Documentary, 2007. 100 min.  Available only by purchase through the History Channel.  A few video stores may have it.  Blood Diamonds is a dramatic, accurate journalistic account of the current trade in--and history of--blood diamonds in Sierra Leone, next-door Liberia, the Congo, and a few other diamond-producing African nations, along with a history of how the DeBeers Company used "diamonds are forever" and other slogans to build what once was a small market for them into the huge market there is today.  Half or more of the film is specifically about Sierra Leone, and as such it serves as an excellent historical and visual background for the recent civil war in Sierra Leone.  [IHCC students, this video is available at the reserve desk in the Library.]

Catch A Fire (South Africa)

Movie video.  Anti-apartheid fiction based on true-life story.  Stars Derek Luke and Tim Robbins. It received 3.5 out of 4 stars by Jeff Strickler (Star Trib film critic), who says, "In the post-9/11 era, it's nigh unto impossible to make a sympathetic movie about a terrorist. Director Philip Noyce and star Derek Luke manage the impossible in 'Catch a Fire,' a true story about a South African man who is considered a national hero in his country's battle against apartheid."

Children of War (Uganda)
Documentary.  28 min., 2001.  Dir. Grunnet.  Distrib. Filmmakers Library, New York (www.filmakers.com).  
Ugandan child soldiers (1 boy, 1 girl).  Available only through college and university libraries and by individual purchase ($295).  (Available by request at Inver Hills Library, on reserve for viewing in the Library's video room.)

Coexist (Rwanda)

Documentary.  37 min.  2010. "Coexist is a documentary and educational outreach project in use by more than 3,000 schools and community organizations in 50 states and more than a dozen countries. Our project includes a 40-minute film and a four-lesson Teacher’s Guide, which can be used in the classroom and in support of positive school climate campaigns, to counter bullying, and to encourage positive choices to prevent violence" (www.coexistdocumentary.org).  

This film is available in libraries (e.g., the Inver Hills College Library). 

Cry, the Beloved Country (South Africa)

Movie Video, 1995. 3 of 4 stars.  About 105 min.  Fiction: Historical Drama.  Stars James Earl Jones and Richard Harris.  According to Time?Warner Cable, "A preacher's son kills a rich white man's son in Johannesburg," the capital of South Africa.  The movie has the often magnificent James Earl Jones speaking English with a wonderfully lilting Bushman/Afrikaner accent as he depicts the trials and tribulations of a very good man and Christian preacher whose sons fall from grace.  The film also has wonderful scenic views of the countryside and brief but accurate views of colonial Johannesburg, both the good and bad sides of town.  The musical score also is lush.  The original novel by the same name, written by Alan Paton, was rather famous in its time for showing some of the deeply rooted problems in apartheid South Africa (now no longer officially divided by race) and conveying how Europeans ran their African colonies.  The movie conveys less of this colonizing culture, but it does emphasize the novel's main themes: that both tragedy and kindness are events that cross racial and cultural barriers and can come into the life of anyone.

Cry Freetown (Sierra Leone)

Video, 199x. 3-4 stars. Approx. 1/2 hr.  Documentary by Sorious Samura.  (See also Return to Freetown below.)

Samura, a Sierra Leonean,  "shocked the world and changed his country's destiny" with this film depicting the civil war years of Sierra Leone.  He won the 1999 Rory Peck Freelance Television Cameraman Award, the Mohamed Amin award, and a 1999 Free Press-Africa award for the film.  To order it, see "Cry Freetown Web Site."

The Devil Came on Horseback (Darfur Region of Sudan)

Video, 2007. 3-3.5 stars.  85 min.  Documentary by Annie Suindberg & Ricki Stern.  Brian Steidle narrates his trips to Darfur.

This award-winning film is a difficult-to-watch but important film on the genocide in Darfur.  Steidle, a U.S. Marine Captain, volunteered to be an unarmed observer of the genocide in Darfur.  Completely unprepared for what he saw, he took many pictures of murdered villagers, burned villages and corpses, and living people explaining with great heartbreak what happened to them.  Steidle's photos were instrumental in getting the United States to declare the events in Darfur a genocide and in getting the U.N. to begin trying to take action.

Ghosts of Rwanda (Rwanda)

Movie Video, 2004.  120 min. 3-4 stars.  Documentary.  Produced and Financed by PBS, BBC, the MacArthur Foundation, and US News & World Report news magazine.  (See also Hotel Rwanda and Keepers of Memory below.)

This excellent documentary is a good companion piece for Hotel Rwanda (below), telling the real story behind the movie's fictionalized account of the death of almost one million people in ethnic cleansing.  The film contains interviews with a number of major players: UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, former President Bill Clinton, and many others.  It also includes some of the more grisly real-life scenes of hundreds of corpses rotting in the sun or piled under church porticos, and even one or two actual killings by machete.  If it has a fault, it is in its relentless faulting of the world's powers for not stopping what, at the time to careless outsiders, seemed to be just another minor civil war.  This video is an excellent and deeply moving introduction to the Rwandan genocidal catastrophe.

God Grew Tired of Us (USA)

Movie Video, 2006, 89 min., 3-4 stars.  Documentary.  Director, Christopher Quinn.   Narrated by Nicole Kidman.  ***.  Orphaned by a tumultuous civil war in the Sudan and traveling barefoot across the sub-Saharan desert, John, Daniel and Panther were among the 25,000 "Lost Boys" who fled villages, formed surrogate families and sought refuge from famine, disease, wild animals and attacks from rebel soldiers. They traveled together for five years and against all odds crossed into the UN's refugee camp in Kenya, where they were selected to re-settle in the United States. Director Christopher Quinn explores the indomitable spirit of these three "Lost Boys," who triumph over seemingly insurmountable adversities to build active and fulfilling new lives while remaining deeply committed to helping those left behind.   Details: www.godgrewtiredofus.com and www.landmarktheatres.com/
mn/godgrewtiredofus.html.

Guns, Germs, and Steel (USA)

A National Geographic Video aired on PBS, 3-4 stars.  A documentary series based on the Pulitzer-prizewinning book by the same name.