MKJ films and Idrissou Mora Kpai films On Demand
On America Street in Charleston’s East Side neighborhood, Joe is the owner of a small corner store, the heart of an old but slowly disappearing black community. Almost half of all African-Americans trace their origins back to Charleston, a city that is still haunted by its slave owning past. In the face of the multiple challenges that African Americans face, Joe is determined to stay hopeful and to resist losing his neighborhood to the rising forces of gentrification.
My film captures three months during 2015 of Joe’s daily struggles set against the backdrop of racist violence in the city, from the killing of Walter Scott by a police officer to the Emanuel Church massacre by a young white supremacist.
Between 1946 and 1954, over 60 000 African soldiers were enlisted to fight the Viet Minh.Pitted against one another by circumstances, these two colonised peoples came into contact and a number of African soldiers took Vietnamese women as wives. Out of these unions, numerous mixed-race children were born. At the end of the war, the colonial army ordered that all the black children be repatriated to Africa, officially to protect them from the Viet Minh. While some children left with their mothers and fathers, others were simply taken away by their fathers, leaving their mothers behind. Abandoned in orphanages, those that had neither mother nor father were put up for mass adoption by African officers, as was the case with Christophe.
Christophe long avoided facing the scars and identity complexes left by this abrupt separation from his mother and homeland. By encouraging him to undertake a journey into his own past, the film opens a little-known chapter of the Indochina war.
Arlit is a case study in environmental racism set in a uranium mining town in the Sahara desert of Niger. Here European corporations extract nuclear power and profits leaving behind disease, contamination and unemployment. Ironically the primary activities of Arlit today is waiting, waiting to die of radiation related sicknesses or to emigrate to find work in Europe itself.
Arlit was once a boom town. During the oil crunch of the early 70’s its uranium mines flourished eventually employing 25,000 workers from around the world in high paying jobs. Arlit was alive 24 hours a day, with frequent international flights, nightlife, earning it the nickname, “le deuxiéme Paris.” Then came the collapse in uranium prices and the Tuareg rebellion against the central government in Niamey more than 500 miles to the southwest. Arlit became a shadow of its former self.
When there was nothing more which the Europeans wanted they abandoned the town leaving behind the derelict machinery littering the desert which is so memorable an image in the film. Arlit demonstrates the ultimate bankruptcy of overseas investment in commodity based industry as a strategy for development.