African Cinema and Human Rights

Bringing theory and practice together, African Cinema and Human Rights argues that moving images have a significant role to play in advancing the causes of justice and fairness. The contributors to this volume identify three key ways in which film can achieve these goals: documenting human rights abuses and thereby supporting the claims of victims and goals of truth and reconciliation within larger communities; legitimating, and consequently solidifying, an expanded scope for human rights; and promoting the realization of social and economic rights. Including the voices of African scholars, scholar-filmmakers, African directors Jean-Marie Teno and Gaston Kaboré, and researchers whose work focuses on transnational cinema, this volume explores overall perspectives, and differences of perspective, pertaining to Africa, human rights, and human rights filmmaking alongside specific case studies of individual films and areas of human rights violations. With its interdisciplinary scope, attention to practitioners' self-understandings, broad perspectives, and particular case studies, African Cinema and Human Rights is a foundational text that offers questions, reflections, and evidence that help us to consider film's ideal role within the context of our ever-continuing struggle towards a more just global society.

Mette Hjort is Chair Professor of Humanities and Dean of Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University. She is editor (with Ursula Lindqvist) of A Companion to Nordic Cinema.

Eva Jorholt is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Copenhagen, and former editor in chief of the Danish Film Institute’s journal Kosmorama. She is editor (with Mette Hjort and Eva Novrup Redvall) of The Danish Directors 2: Dialogues on the New Danish Fiction Cinema.