Concerning Violence
(Göran Olsson, 2014, 89 min, Sweden/Finland, Digital)
Grand Jury World Cinema Documentary Prize Nominee at the Sundance Film Festival
Winner of the Cinema Fairbindet Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival
Concerning Violence, a new documentary from Göran Hugo Olsson (director of The Black Power Mixtape) is a bold visual narration on colonization in Africa, based on newly discovered archival material covering the struggle for liberation from colonial rule in the late ’60s and ’70s.
Accompanied by text from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, featuring narration by singer and activist Lauryn Hill and an interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, renowned Columbia University professor and post-colonial cultural theorist, Concerning Violence depicts some of the most daring moments ever captured during the anti-colonialist struggle from the Angolan War of Independence to the Mozambique Liberation Front. Concerning Violence is an emotionally resonant cinematic essay, which confronts the dehumanizing mechanisms of colonialism to illuminate the urgent need for change in the present.
“Concerning Violence suggests that the lesson has yet to be learned, and it’s only a matter of time until history repeats itself again, and action is taken.” – Kevin Jagernauth, Indiewire
“This disturbing, layered film is mercifully free of pat attempts to bring things up to date: chronologically speaking, it concludes in 1987. Yet there’s no doubt that its final passage – in which Europe is described as ‘literally the creation of the third world’, and America as a ‘monstrous’ colonial power – is intended to give the viewer plenty to process with regard to contemporary nations still suffering the pronounced after-effects of colonisation. In many cases, Fanon’s astringent words seem as relevant today as ever.” – Ashley Clark, BFI
