AAS 2500: African Refugees, Cultures & Stories - Resource List

Over 65 million people around the world have been forced from their homes to escape famine, climate change and war in the greatest human displacement since World War II. Human Flow, an epic film journey led by the internationally renowned artist Ai Weiwei, gives a powerful visual expression to this massive human migration. The documentary elucidates both the staggering scale of the refugee crisis and its profoundly personal human impact, following a chain of urgent human stories that stretches across the globe in countries including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, France, Greece, Germany, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Mexico, and Turkey.

Senator Barack Obama travels to the land of his ancestry. From South Africa to Kenya to a Darfur refugee camp in Chad, Obama explores the vast continent that is gaining increasing importance in this age of globalization.

The Forgotten Refugees explores the history and destruction of Middle Eastern and North African Jewish communities, some of which had existed for over 2,500 years. Employing extensive testimony of survivors from Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Iraq and Iran, the film recounts the stories--of joy and of suffering--that nearly a million individuals have carried with them for so long. Segments on the contributions of Middle Eastern Jews to politics, business and music, testify to the enormously rich cultures which fleeing Jews left behind. The film weaves personal stories with dramatic archival footage of rescue missions, historic images of exodus and resettlement, and analysis by contemporary scholars, to tell the story of how and why the Arab world's Jewish population declined from one million in 1945 to several thousand today

Presents the plight of young, male Sudanese refugees, known as "lost boys," being displaced to foreign countries due to civil war in their homeland. The film tells the story of three of the lost boys who struggled to come to the United States for a better life, while still attempting to assist the family and friends they have left behind.

A minefield and the second largest military wall in the world separate Sidahmed, Zaara and Taher from their homeland that they only know from their parents' stories. They belong to the Sahrawis, one of the world's most forgotten people, abandoned in a refugee camp in the middle of the desert ever since Morocco drove them out of Western Sahara forty years ago. This film is the unusual portrait of a group of young friends living in a refugee camp in the stony Saharan desert. They spend their days fixing cars, even though they can't really take them anywhere, fighting for political change and dreaming of a future that most likely will never happen. With all the expectations, strengths and illusions of being young they all find different ways to expand beyond the physical borders that surround them.

Follows two teenage South Sudanese boys, orphaned by their war torn country, who left one life behind and traveled to the United States looking for a safer environment and learning to cope with the unfamiliar complexities of contemporary American society.

"You are watching the auction of human beings." With those words, CNN's award-winning investigative journalist Nima Elbagir shattered the world's hope that slavery was confined to history. Elbagir's explosive under-cover footage shows Libyan "auctioneers" selling African migrants in an open-air market for as little as $400 USD. They call the men "merchandise." CNN's investigation ignited protests around the world, prompted world leaders to issue harsh condemnation and touched off investigations in Libya, Europe and the United Nations. Now Elbagir and her team push the story forward as the CNN Freedom Project explores Libya's detention centers, documents numerous migrants' testimonies of ransom, torture and death, and examines the underlying political motivations that helped set these modern-day human rights atrocities in motion.

For forty years now the Sahrawi people have lived in exile. Their home: five refugee camps in one of the hottest parts of the desert where summer temperatures reach over 50 degrees centigrade. Having fled the Moroccan invasion of their homeland, Western Sahara, over 100,000 people now live in what is in effect an open prison where they are completely dependent on the World Food Programme for their survival. Yet they continue to dream of the prospect of returning to their homeland in northwest Africa. After years of frustration, armed conflict, and broken UN promises many of the young men are contemplating a return to war.

In Rwanda, in 1994, Hutu militia committed a bloody genocide, murdering one million Tutsis, and repeatedly raping thousands of women. Many of these women became pregnant, and have had to try for years to reconcile their contradictory feelings of both love and hate towards the children they bore as the result of their brutal rapes. These are some of their touching stories.

Philippe Mvuyekure has spent the last five years living in a refugee camp in Tanzania. Now, he's on his way home. He's among thousands of refugees convinced that the bitter, 10-year civil war that decimated his homeland of Burundi may be coming to an end. The civil war here between Hutu rebels and the Tutsi-dominated army uprooted over a million people and killed more than 300,000. But the benefits of a peace process are finally beginning to emerge. Using traditional mediation systems and peacemakers, Burundi is introducing innovative peace and reconciliation projects. The aim is to start a grass roots movement to bring a lasting peace to Burundi and its long-suffering citizens. This program examines the future for Burundi, for power sharing and for a rapprochement between warring factions.

There has been a lot of pain and suffering and even death in the small African country of Rwanda. Victims and perpetrators share their everyday lives and even drive through the countryside together in order to tell their reconciliation story.

This documentary travels the migration corridor forged between Sherbrooke, Quebec, and the town of Brooks, Alberta, by French-speaking Africans. Most have come from the Democratic Republic of Congo, some by way of refugee camps in Uganda and Tanzania. Unable to find employment in Quebec, they travelled out West. An interweaving of personal stories and the filmmaker's own trips back and forth through the corridor offer an honest look at how much work is yet to be done to successfully integrate these newcomers.

In the heart of the Congo, at the end of a war, a handful of aid workers help refugees who have lost everything. They mobilize villagers to dig wells for clean water, train health workers, and nurse children with acute malnutrition back to health. They are confronted with threats of violence from roving militias, systemic corruption, and a legacy of colonial dependency. And there are times when it is very clear that these workers exist apart from those they aim to help, benefiting from services and luxuries of the modern world that are beyond the reach of the rural Congolese. In spite of this the Congolese and European aid workers struggle to encourage the will of the people, and build the skills necessary, for a self-sufficient future.

Most refugees and new arrivals need to quickly learn a range of skills; increasingly this means IT as well as literacy and numeracy. City Learning Centres can have a key role to play and in the London Borough of Lambeth, the CLC is currently based at the British Film Institute on the South Bank. There's naturally an emphasis on film-making and digital media; tutor Blossom Carasco works with students on animation, photo-shop and more. A group of EAL Year 10s come with their teacher Anthony Gunning to work towards the Trinity Guildhall Arts Award; Jose (Portugal) describes his latest film, Nadine (Guinea Bissau) collects photographs of people's clothes out on the South Bank for her final project; Bai (Sierra Leone) describes the study he wants to make comparing African and European cultures. Project Manager Julia Lawrence explains how the course helps build on their English as just one of the skills they ll need to communicate in future

Ousmane Sembène was one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived, as well as the most renowned African director of the twentieth century—and yet his name still deserves to be better known in the rest of the world. He made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring BLACK GIRL. Sembène, who was also an acclaimed novelist in his native Senegal, transforms a deceptively simple plot—about a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white family and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a prison, both figuratively and literally—into a complexly layered critique of the lingering colonialist mind-set of a supposedly postcolonial world. Featuring a moving central performance by M’Bissine Thérèse Diop, BLACK GIRL is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statement—and one of the essential films of the 1960s.

Sadi is from a very different world. At 17 she fled female genital mutilation in Gambia. Six months later, having gone 'the Backway', surviving the Sahara, civil war in Libya and the boat journey, she ends up in Sicily together with many other refugees, most of them men. We visit Sadi often with the camera. She allowed us into her tiny room where she stayed whilst waiting for her documents. Sometimes she talks, sometimes she's silent. The film tries to understand her west African attitudes, sometimes open, sometimes closed - trying to find a common language for her inconceivable story.

When xenophobic attacks broke out across South Africa in 2008, many were shocked by a violence that felt like a violation of the principles of their democratic nation. Where Do I Stand? is a window into the lives of seven young people grappling with their actions during and after this violence. They include a Rwandan refugee, a girl wrestling with the reality of foreigners in her township, a boy facing calls of cowardice, a girl whose family sheltered their Malawian gardener. This violence was another challenge to a country still struggling with the legacy of apartheid -- poverty, unemployment, racial divisions. Where Do I Stand? captures the optimistic voices of youth struggling with their experiences and carving out their own places in this complex nation