Category Archives: Movie Review

The Critically Uncritical Remaking of Churchill

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Erin Isaac Filmmakers make bad historians. While it is well understood that historically-based movies should not be taken for fact, film continues to play a major role in forming public perceptions of the past. Historians, realizing this phenomenon, often get caught up in the details of where film goes wrong, without fully understanding why these flaws matter. The mistakes made… Read more »

“Colonization Road” and Challenging Settler Colonialism in Canada

By Anne Janhunen Last week I attended the world premiere of Colonization Road at the imagineNATIVE Film & Media Arts Festival. Directed by Michelle St. John, the film follows Anishinaabe comedian and activist Ryan McMahon as he delves into the history of Indigenous dispossession and settler colonialism in Canada. Examining physical markers of this history such as Colonization Road in… Read more »

One Island, Two Worlds: Conflict between The Dominican Republic and Haiti

By Thomas Zajac  “One Island, Two Worlds” describes the experience shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti, both located on the one island in the Caribbean that is shared by two nations. Recently, the Dominican government has ruled to take citizenship away from all children of Haitian immigrants born after 1929. It is also the phrase that introduces the film… Read more »

Miss Representation: A Must-See

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By Christine McLaughlin Miss Representation (2011) is a documentary film that challenges the limiting representations of women in American media, exploring how these impact girls’ and women’s sense of self-worth and emotional health, while contributing to the overall devaluation of women in contemporary culture. Building from the premise that the medium is the message, the film is a call for media… Read more »

History Slam Episode Twelve: Media Review Roundup

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https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Media-Review.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadBy Sean Graham Like a lot of people, I used the break over the holidays to catch up on a couple of TV shows and movies that I had missed through the fall. I have to say that binge watching, while a lot of fun, can actually be difficult – it’s easy to lose… Read more »

You Can’t Stop the Truth: The Story of the Original Founding Members of the Sugarhill Gang

By Francesca D’Amico When The Sugarhill Gang wrote and recorded “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979, little did they know that this single-take recording would serve as a template for establishing an audience and market for Hip Hop, and would also mark the beginning of their thirty year-long battle with contractual turmoil. This story is not new to African American artists. Rather,… Read more »

Stories of Exile: Movie Review of “The Queen and I”

The Queen and I (2008), directed and produced by Swedish-Iranian filmmaker Nahid Persson Sarvestani, follows the former Empress of Iran, Farah Pahlavi and Sarvestani as they discuss their lives following the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

Movie Review: “Swedes and Scots and Sadists…Oh My”

This past weekend I watched two movies that were seemingly more different than any two movies could be. They did have things in common though. Both films were intriguing and entertaining in their own way and at their heart is a similar theme: reclaiming and uncovering the “true” past.