Colonialism

Empire, resistance, and the people who were never asked. Three ways in.

The Fever Dream of Empire

Imperial hubris, delirium and collapse — the colonizer goes upriver and loses his mind.

#1
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Conrad's Heart of Darkness moved to Vietnam: the further upriver, the less anyone remembers why they came.
#2
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
A conquistador declares himself master of a raft full of dying men. Herzog makes greed look exactly like madness.
#3
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
An Englishman convinced he can remake the desert — and the empire that was always going to cash in his heroics.
#4
The Last Emperor (1987)
A boy crowned ruler of nothing, passed between colonizers, warlords and revolutionaries like a museum piece.
#5
Beau Travail (2000)
Foreign Legionnaires drilling in the Djibouti sun, guarding an empire that has already left.

Revolt, asymmetric resistance, and the brutal arithmetic of liberation.

#1
The Battle of Algiers (1966)
Shot like a newsreel, it shows both bombs and torture without flinching — still screened in military academies.
#2
Touki Bouki (1973)
Two young Senegalese lovers scheme to escape to Paris — the revolution here is wanting out at all.
#3
Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)
A bourgeois intellectual stays behind in post-revolution Havana and can't decide what he's waiting for.
#4
No Other Land (2024)
A Palestinian–Israeli collective films their village being demolished, home by home. Resistance as documentation.

When the perpetrators were never punished — they wrote the history books instead.

#1
The Act of Killing (2012)
Indonesian death-squad leaders cheerfully restage their massacres as movie scenes. Unforgettable, unbearable.
#2
The Look of Silence (2014)
The companion piece: a brother quietly questions the men who killed his sibling — and who still run the town.
#3
The Zone of Interest (2023)
A commandant's family tends the garden next to Auschwitz. The horror lives entirely in the sound design.