Screen/Society--AMI Showcase--Visiting filmmaker Idrissou Mora Kpai presents "Indochina, Traces of a Mother" (documentary)

Tuesday, September 11, 2012 - 3:00pm to 4:45pm
Screen/Society--AMI Showcase--Visiting filmmaker Idrissou Mora Kpai presents "Indochina, Traces of a Mother" (documentary)

Film Screening:

Filmmaker and Duke Visiting Assistant Professor Idrissou Mora Kpai presents his documentary film:

Indochina, Traces of a Mother
(Idrissou Mora Kpai, 2011, 71 min, France/Benin/Vietnam, in French and African dialects with English subtitles, Color, DVD)

Between 1946 & 1954, over 60,000 African soldiers were enlisted by the French to fight the Viet Minh. Pitted against one another by circumstances, these two colonized peoples came into contact and a number of African soldiers took Vietnamese women as wives.

Out of these unions, numerous mixed-race children were born. At the end of the war, the colonial army ordered that all the black children be repatriated to Africa, officially to protect them from the Viet Minh. While some children left with their mothers and fathers, others were simply taken away by their fathers, leaving their mothers behind. Abandoned in orphanages, those that had neither mother nor father were put up for mass adoption by African officers, as was the case with Christophe. By encouraging Christophe to undertake a journey into his own past, the film opens a little-known chapter of the Indochina war.

--"Mora Kpai is one of the foremost documentary filmmakers in West Africa, if not the entire continent" (The Huffington Post).

Cost: Free and open to the public

Sponsors: The Program in the Arts of the Moving Image (AMI), the Program in Women's Studies, and the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS)

Bryan Center Griffith Film Theater