Favorite 10 Feature Films of Nonviolent Protest and Nonviolent Struggle
Feature films which show the dynamics of nonviolence, civil disobedience, war resistance/resistance to war, pacifism, and conscientious objection/acts based on conscience, at work.
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- DirectorLuis PuenzoStarsNorma AleandroHéctor AlterioChunchuna VillafañeDuring the final months of Argentinian Military Dictatorship in 1983, a high school teacher sets out to find out who the mother of her adopted daughter is.An astonishing film relating the story of a privileged woman, a teacher, during Argentina's "Dirty War" of the 1970s, as she is awakened by women involved with the Mothers of the Disappeared to the lies and brutality on which she has unwittingly been complicit. The extent of the tragedy might be unexpected, and it breaks your heart -- open.
- DirectorCosta-GavrasStarsYves MontandIrene PapasJean-Louis TrintignantThe public murder of a prominent politician and doctor amid a violent demonstration is covered up by military and government officials. A tenacious magistrate is determined not to let them get away with it.Based on the real-life assassination of Greek pacifist leader Grigoris Lambrakis, it's a whodunit, a work about the power of investigative journalism, and a terrifying film about the abuse of government power in the name of nationalism and militarism. The momentum and pacing of the film is indelible.
- DirectorOliver SchmitzStarsThomas MogotlaneMarcel van HeerdenThembi MtshaliMapantsula tells the story of Panic, a petty gangster who inevitably becomes caught up in the growing anti-apartheid struggle and has to choose between individual gain and a united stand against the system.I believe Mapantsula is one of the best movies about the struggle against oppression ever made (almost up there with Satyajit Ray's Distant Thunder, Puenzo's Official Story, and Beresford's Breaker Morant in my book). Like these other films, it beautifully and powerfully focuses on the impact of government violence on the lives of characters who are, at first, unaware of the larger forces which have been shaping their lives.
Mapantsula was ingeniously made under the noses of the South African apartheid censors. The director submitted a script for an innocuous crime-drama, and while the censors were on the set, that is what they filmed. When the censors were not hovering immediately nearby, they filmed the real script - the story of a mapantsula, or thief, who becomes politicized in an apartheid jail. Once they edited the film, they smuggled the finished print out of the country.
The film is at times brutal in its realistic depiction of the physical and psychological tortures employed by the regime of that time. At other times, it is a lyrical and believable evocation of the growing consciousness, and evolving conscience, of the title character, as he encounters more overtly political prisoners in the jail. - DirectorHerbert J. BibermanStarsJuan ChacónRosaura RevueltasWill GeerMexican workers at a zinc mine call a general strike. It is only through the solidarity of the workers, and importantly the indomitable resolve of their wives, mothers, and daughters, that they eventually triumph.A pro-feminist union-organizing classic of effective nonviolent organizing, made in defiance of McCarthyism, featuring the heated debates between male workers and their families as they strive to build solidarity in the face of corporate exploitation and violent repression.
- DirectorOusmane SembeneStarsFatoumata CoulibalyMaimouna Hélène DiarraSalimata TraoréWhen a woman shelters a group of girls from suffering female genital mutilation, she starts a conflict that tears her village apart.A wrenching story of a few girls who seek the protection of a woman and a few women and male allies in a Senegalese village to avoid undergoing the torture of the traditional genital mutilation.
- DirectorJohn SaylesStarsVincent SpanoTony Lo BiancoStephen MendilloAn intersecting tale with a multitude of characters living lives which, in one way or another, revolve around an old apartment block scheduled to be demolished.This one is a bit of a stretch for this category, but I think it's Sayle's best work (and that's saying a lot), and it empathetically depicts the interlocking lives of a dozen characters, including activists who are realistically depicted as simultaneously idealistic and demagogic, as they struggle to deal with an economically imploding US ex-industrial city.
- DirectorJohn SaylesStarsChris CooperJames Earl JonesMary McDonnellA labor union organizer comes to an embattled mining community brutally and violently dominated and harassed by the mining company.The challenges of unionizing in the coal fields of West Virginia when the union was under attack from imported strikebreakers, divide-and-rule racist tactics by the coal operators, fundamentalist religious opposition, hired gun-using strike breakers, and an agent provocateur. The tragedy in this case is expected, and it still breaks your heart.
- DirectorSatyajit RayStarsSoumitra ChatterjeeVictor BanerjeeSwatilekha SenguptaWhen the movie opens, a woman is recalling the events that molded her perspective on the world. Years ago, her husband, a wealthy Western-educated landowner, challenged tradition by providing her with schooling, and inviting her out of the seclusion in which married women were kept, to the consternation of more conservative relatives. Meeting her husband's visiting friend from college, a leader of an economic rebellion against the British, she takes up his political cause, despite her husbands warnings. As the story progresses, the relationship between the woman and the visitor becomes more than platonic, and the political battles, pitting rich against poor and Hindu against Moslem, turn out not to be quite as simple as she had first thought.At once an argument against the cloistering of women in India and a warning against the danger of demagogic social movement "leaders" who base their appeal on ethnic bigotry, religious hatred, and violent tactics. Another Satyajit Ray masterpiece.
- DirectorTim RobbinsStarsSusan SarandonSean PennRobert ProskyA nun, while comforting a convicted killer on death row, empathizes with both the killer and his victim's families.A fictionalized version of the work of capital punishment abolitionist and nun Helen Prejean (whose famous line is: which of us would want to be judged solely by our worst action). The power of the anti-death penalty message is reinforced by depicting the convict on death row as fully guilty of a horribly brutal crime, but still a human being.
- DirectorRichard AttenboroughStarsBen KingsleyJohn GielgudRohini HattangadiThe life of the lawyer who became the famed leader of the Indian revolts against the British rule through his philosophy of nonviolent protest.I hesitate to list this one, because it is horribly hagiographic about Gandhi the very flawed person, which it utterly refuses to depict. Ben Kingsley does a fantastic acting job, but the screenplay does violence to the truth, and thus to Gandhi's best messages, by portraying him as a plaster Mahatma (great soul). (For a short "pacifist critique of Gandhi," see my short piece at http://www.peaceworkmagazine.org/pacifist-critique-gandhi). Despite it's utter failure as a biography, it does show powerful scenes of nonviolent action at work that are spectacular and unparallelled, and for this reason I reluctantly include it.