Concerning Violence (2014) 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.
In the middle of the Cold War, radical Swedish filmmakers set out to capture the anti-imperialist liberation movements in Africa first hand. With their 16mm footage, found in the Swedish Television archives, filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson create[s] a visual narrative from Africa – images of the pursuit of freedom, the Cold War and Sweden. Swedish filmmakers, with their sense of solidarity with anti-imperial and socialist struggles around the world at the time, created images and stories which still resonate today, and can change and deepen our impression of the globalized world we live in.
This screening, co-hosted by the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, will be followed by a discussion with Anjuli Raza Kolb, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Williams College, Anthony Alessandrini, author of Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics and Associate Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College, and Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Core Lecturer at Columbia University and Director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense. dir. Göran Hugo Olsson, 2014
Sundance Film Festival 2014, World Cinema Documentary Competition
Gothenburg International Film Festival 2014, Dragon Award Best Nordic Documentary
Berlin 64th International Film Festival 2014, Panorama Section
“Göran Hugo Olsson doesnt make documentaries so much as incendiary devices, diving deep into Swedish film archives for vintage clips that have sat like so much undetonated ordnance all these years.” — Variety
“Concerning Violence isn’t out to soothe its audience with platitudes about peace, love, and understanding.” — Keith Uhlich, A.V. Club
“Olsson’s detachment from showing Algeria or, in fact, anything biographical about Fanon, including even a photo of him, is refreshing. There is no hagiography at all in this film, only a commitment to the subaltern histories.” — Warscapes
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