7PM DOORS

FREE

As part of the SOAS Community Film Festival, The Horse Hospital will screen the documentary Concerning Violence (2014) and Jean Rouch's controversial Les Maitres Fous (1955), introduced by Marloes Janson lecturer in West African Anthropology at SOAS.

The programme illuminates forms of resistance in British and French colonial Africa of the 1950’s and conversely the nationalist and independence movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Though both films seek in their own way to re-address colonial histories, they are as relevant now as they were respectively important in their time.

Concerning Violence

A film by Göran Hugo Olsson Based on Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and narrated by Ms Lauryn Hill.

Concerning Violence is both an archive-driven documentary covering the most daring moments in the struggle for liberation in the Third World, as well as an exploration into the mechanisms of decolonization through text from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon’s landmark book, written over 50 years ago, is still a major tool for understanding and illuminating the neocolonialism happening today, as well as the violence and reactions against it. 2014, 85 minutes.

Les Maîtres Fous (The Mad Masters)

 A short film directed by anthropologist, filmmaker and pioneer of cinéma vérité, Jean Rouch (1917 – 2004). Introduced by Marloes Janson lecturer in West African Anthropology at SOAS.

Considered the first work of ethnofiction, this controversial film centres around the Hauku movement, a ceremony performed in the suburbs of Accra, Ghana, which was still a British Colony. Through dance and mimicry members of the Hauku become possessed, taking on symbolic caricatures of British Colonial administrators. 1955, 28 minutes.

______________________________________________________________

This event is part of the first SOAS Community Free Film Festival which will run between the 7-12 of March 2016, with events taking place inside and outside of the university.

All events free and open to the public. Full details of all screenings can be found here.