Concerning Violence

The first revelation in Concerning Violence is that Lauryn Hill’s been doing more with her days than massacring her back catalogue onstage and signing up to tax evasion schemes. She provides the soulful voiceover for this documentary on the end of colonial rule in Africa, drawing on the writings of pioneering anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon. Her narration rolls over archival footage of the liberation struggles on the continent which unsettled the world order in the 1960s and 70s.
This eye-opening footage is the film’s second revelation. We witness a night raid in an Angolan jungle, men sniping cows from a helicopter, a young Robert Mugabe waxing lyrical about the future of his nation. Swedish director Göran Olsson is no stranger to television archives, having trawled them for his remarkable last work The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975. If this film is anything like that one, expect a thoughtful, incendiary dissection of a turbulent period in recent history.

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