"African culture will be revolutionary or will not be", concludes this vast historical portrait on Pan-Africanism as thoughts on emancipation. Edited with a dynamic pacing reminiscent of black music, the great theorists of decolonization and incoming national leaders appear together with the architects of new black culture, while the on-screen texts shred the colonialist system and its machinery of oppression.
Born in New York in 1928, he is a US-born photographer and film director who has conducted his career in France. Closely tied to the May 1968 cultural and political movement in Paris, his work has satirized consumer society, the fashion world, US imperialism and interventionism, both in his work as a photographer and in such feature-length short films as Qui êtes-vous, Polly Magoo? (1966), Mister Freedom (1969), the collective film Far from Vietnam (1967) and The Pan-African Festival of Algiers (1970).