Anti-colonialism

Final Friday Film: Camp de Thiaroye

In Camp de Thiaroye the tirailleurs use the traditional, highly rhetorical, almost theatrical, mode of debate of their various societies, but adapt this ritual form to the only language they have in common: the pidgin which the French insultingly call “petit nègre”, a language which is both a result and a tool of colonial exploitation. Here it is revealed as having a potential for eloquence, allowing it to become a moving medium for the articulation of feelings, needs, grievances and resistance, and thus ultimately for the development of the tirailleurs‘ collective political awareness and consciousness of themselves as Africans.

Celebrate the Limerick Soviet of 1919

The seismic tremors that the October Revolution sent through Germany, Hungary and Italy are well known to students of the post-World War One Europe. Less familiar is the fact that the revolution’s ripple effects were felt as far to the west as Ireland. This April will mark the centennial of an episode in Irish revolutionary history known at the time—and since—as the Limerick Soviet.

Pontecorvo Double Feature!

Nine years ago the anti-bourgeois film festival began at the Brecht Forum to get to nights like this, where films as profound as The Battle of Algiers and Burn! could be viewed and then discussed, not merely consumed.