Catalog Search Results
Language
English
Description
The Sahel has long been prone to cycles of drought, but those of the 20th century were especially severe, devastating the land and the lives of the people living there. This program spotlights the efforts of aid agency director Mathieu Ouedraogo to regreen the territory by teaching farmers in Burkina Faso traditional conservation methods. The result? "It's like a miracle," he says of an anti-flooding technique successfully employed by the villagers....
Language
English
Description
In the Lord's Resistance Army, eight out of ten rebels are under 16 years of age. Some are as young as 6. Providing rare footage of guerrilla leader Joseph Kony, interviews with President Museveni and village and church leaders, and firsthand accounts of the child soldiers and their families, this program reveals the stark facts of life in northern Uganda's Acholi villages. There thousands of children-both male and female-have been forcibly conscripted...
Language
English
Description
Elderly Nana Chinegowe is left to care for her three orphaned grandchildren. Other than occasional casual work as a day laborer, she has no mean to support them and they often go without food. This film tells the story of Malawi's ultra poor, and investigates the Millennium Development Goals of reducing maternal mortality, hunger, and poverty.
Language
English
Description
Throughout history, humanitarian military interventions have had mixed results. Colonial powers used the cover of humanitarian intervention to subjugate "savage" or "barbaric" cultures and "civilize" these countries through occupation. This episode examines the interventions in Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, and Rwanda, and their impacts on human rights. Also, reports from Tajikistan, Iraq, and South Africa look at the lasting affects of intervention. Finally,...
Language
English
Description
George and Esther struggle to raise a family in Africa's largest slum. Both are HIV positive but in a way that doesn't count in this doc. HIV has become normal and that's how George and Esther deal with it. This film is rather about love in the middle of a war-torn slum. A film about being African in today's Africa and how, at the lowest denominator, people deal with hardship and can still find life a joy. Citizen Oketch does not demand we pity George's...
Language
English
Description
This program shows the uprising which succeeded in throwing out the French from the point of view of an Algerian Arab, showing the conditions and following the thought processes and the steps that led to insurrection, and the revolt itself. The words are those of the colonized North Africans-the man in the street as well as the intellectual and politician-and of such radical theoreticians of revolt as Franz Fanon.
Language
English
Description
Oulata is a city on the far edge of the Sahara Desert where woman are forced to wait for months while their husbands travel long distances looking for work. This is the story of how three women living there find ways to cope with the absence of their men. As they wait, they paint beautiful patterns on the city walls, play games, and speak refreshingly about their situation. These women create a magical world that breaks many of the stereotypes associated...
Language
English
Description
Focusing on the 1994 Rwandan genocide, this film examines the international justice system and studies the activities of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), which is prosecuting those responsible for the tragedy as well as those of the gacaca courts, or grass courts - the people's tribunals - who are working toward justice through reconciliation. By juxtaposing archival footage of an international court enacting justice behind closed...
Language
English
Description
The Tuareg people of the Sahara Desert are one of the world's last truly nomadic tribes. But their way of life is now under greater threat than ever before, from economic exploitation, from environmental catastrophe, from the scorn of their own government, from Islamist militants, and perhaps most of all from the relentless march of modernity. This revealing film documents the remaining fragments of Tuareg culture and examines a people's struggle...
Language
English
Description
Through her Green Belt Movement, Wangari Maathai-environmental activist, social justice advocate, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient-has planted 30 million trees in Kenya while protecting existing forests endangered by development. A veritable force of nature herself, Maathai communicates her infectious fervor as she advocates environmental action and government reform in this documentary. The program also captures a sense of modern Kenya's history:...
Language
English
Description
This classic episode of the U.S. Army's The Big Picture television series explores the dual role the average U.S. Army soldier plays in Korea. As a soldier, he is constantly alert to the threat of aggression from the Communists in the north. As a representative of democracy, he is a bulwark against the internal conditions that could rob a friendly people of their strength and determination. This video from the National Archives and Records Administration...
Language
English
Description
The ongoing bloodshed in the Democratic Republic of Congo is of such enormity that within the region it is sometimes referred to as the First African World War. In this ABC News program, Ted Koppel presents two successive stories about the struggle going on in Congo. First, he uses a wide-angle lens to capture a decade of crises: the Tutsi genocide in neighboring Rwanda, the resulting flood of refugees into Congo, the irreparable ecological damage...
Language
English
Description
A portrait of the politics and history of Zimbabwe, this program traces Robert Mugabe's rise to power and depicts his 22-year dictatorship in a country where millions rely on food aid to survive, inflation is at 500 percent, and almost three quarters of the country's workforce is unemployed. Also included is rare footage that captures the demand for change and the popular support for the new opposition party, MDC, during the presidential election...
Language
English
Description
Goree Island is where the slave ships anchored, cramming their holds with Africans to be shipped across the Atlantic to work the fields and tend their "owners" throughout the Western Hemisphere; Goree Island is where the enslaved Africans were held until the ships were ready to receive them. This documentary tells the history of the slave trade: the arrival of the first Europeans, the origins of slavery in the Americas, the development of Goree as...