Amber Sweat

Jun 17, 2024 | africasacountry.com | Amber Sweat |Noah Tsika

Two projects that Ousmane Sembène left unfinished were a biopic on Samory Touré, the heroic leader of African resistance to French occupation in 19th century West Africa, and a cinematic version of his very successful novel, God’s Bits of Wood, which documented the long, historic strike by African workers of the Dakar-Niger railroad line: a key infrastructure in the French colonial economy from 1904 that provided the perfect breeding ground for nationalist demands that led to independence for...

Jul 19, 2023 | africasacountry.com | Amber Sweat |Devon Leger

Amid the pomp of France’s Bastille Day celebrations on July 14, lingered a shadow over French republicanism that not even the guest of honor, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, could disguise. The death on June 27 of Nahel Merzouk, yet another young Frenchman of color killed at the hands of police, contradicts the country’s famous republican values: liberté, égalité, fraterinité.

Jul 11, 2023 | africasacountry.com | Amber Sweat |Haythem Guesmi |Lara N. Dotson-Renta

French society is disintegrating in plain sight. Its police government is dissolving its inner logic. Flash Balls crushing its revolts. An iniquitous pension reform knocking its workers out. Streets full of the homeless. Starving students turning to soup kitchens. Recurrent crises perpetuated. Everything stops. Everything starts again. Endlessly. No new direction, no horizon. COVID crisis. Liberticidal alibi, vacuum cleaning. The atomized, digitized, transhumanised human being stripped of his humanity.

Jul 5, 2023 | znetwork.org | Amber Sweat

When French director Mathieu Kassovitz created his magnum opus, La Haine  (Hatred), in 1995, he did so “because kids die.” The film, heralded as a watershed work for cinema of the French banlieues (suburbs), reflects the Parisian periphery, its quotidian, and its ills. In the film, three young men—Vinz, Saïd, and Hubert, who are Jewish, North African, and West African respectively—move through the aftershocks of their friend’s death at the hands of police. Their friend’s name was Abdel Ichaha.

Jul 4, 2023 | africasacountry.com | Amber Sweat |William Shoki |Laurent Dubois

When French director Mathieu Kassovitz created his magnum opus, La Haine  (Hatred), in 1995, he did so “because kids die.” The film, heralded as a watershed work for cinema of the French banlieues (suburbs), reflects the Parisian periphery, its quotidian, and its ills. In the film, three young men—Vinz, Saïd, and Hubert, who are Jewish, North African, and West African respectively—move through the aftershocks of their friend’s death at the hands of police. Their friend’s name was Abdel Ichaha.