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

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Tuesday, September 11, 2012
7:00 pm - 8:45 pm
Introduced by filmmaker + Visiting Assistant Prof. Idrissou Mora Kpai (Q&A to follow)
AMI Showcase

Filmmaker and Duke Visiting Assistant Professor Idrissou Mora Kpai presents his documentary film, "Indochina, Traces of a Mother" (2011, 71 min, France/Benin/Vietnam). -- Between 1946 & 1954, over 60000 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).

Contact: Hank Okazaki