• Osvalde Lewat: MK: Mandela’s Secret Army, 2022

  • Osvalde Lewat: MK: Mandela’s Secret Army, 2022

  • Chadrack Banikina : Ota Benga, 2023

MK: Mandela’s Secret Army

(MK, l’armée secrète de Mandela)

Osvalde Lewat’s eye-opening documentary showcases the forgotten history of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress’s armed revolutionary wing, the uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK). While internationally known and recast as a pacifist and statesman, Mandela was, as one subject notes, foremost “a freedom fighter, as ready to pick up arms as put down arms . . . [for him] to be portrayed as a pacifist is to appropriate our history and place it in a colonial mentality.” Archival footage showcases the brutality of the apartheid era and its crackdowns against dissidents, while interviews with surviving, now-elderly veterans of the group showcase a battle for freedom—and justice—that still continues.

Jason Sanders
FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Osvalde Lewat
Cinematographer
  • Julien Bossé
Language
  • English
  • German
  • French
  • with English subtitles
Print Info
  • Color
  • DCP
  • 57 mins
Source
  • African Film Festival
Preceded By

Ota Benga

Chadrack Banikina, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2023

An animated retelling of the infamous true story of a Congolese citizen exhibited at the Bronx Zoo.

FILM DETAILS 
Language
  • French
  • with English subtitles
Print Info
  • Color
  • DCP
  • 6 mins
source
  • African Film Festival

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