Themes Hope Is of a Different Color Magda Lipska & Monika Talarczyk

Decolonization and Third Cinema: Student Filmmakers and the Struggle for Liberation

Thematic Claim: A Cinema of Liberation Rooted in the School

The student filmmakers from Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East who studied at the Łódź Film School during the Cold War created a distinctive body of work that can be understood as a transnational variant of Third Cinema. Drawing on manifestos such as Solanas and Getino’s “Toward a Third Cinema” and Glauber Rocha’s “Aesthetics of Hunger,” these directors turned their student shorts into instruments of decolonization. Their films did not merely document oppression; they attempted to dismantle colonial visual language, assert new national identities, and connect local struggles to a global anti‑imperialist movement. Yet this project was never simple: the filmmakers had to navigate state‑sponsored censorship, the Polish school’s own pedagogical traditions, and the contradictions of representing “the Third World” from within an Eastern‑bloc institution. This analysis traces the theme across three distinct moments in the book’s narrative: the linguistic and cultural re‑education of the students, the formal innovations used to depict violence and resistance, and the explicit dialogue with Third Cinema theory.

1. Learning to Speak a New Language – Decolonizing the Mind

The very act of studying abroad forced the students to confront the colonial legacies embedded in language and culture. Abdelkader Lagtaa, Mostafa Derkaoui, and others arrived in Poland often after years of French or Spanish colonial rule. Their first task was to master Polish, a Slavic language far removed from Arabic, Berber, or Spanish.

In Abdellah Drissi’s Lesson 41 (1966), the camera lingers on close‑ups of mouths as adult students repeat Polish syllables. The teacher corrects their pronunciation, and they recite lines from Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz – a poem symbolizing Polish national revival. The scene is both a documentation of language acquisition and a subtle act of resistance: these foreign students, who had often fought against colonial systems, are now mastering the colonizer’s tongue on their own terms. The film suggests that decolonization must begin with the reclamation of voice and representation. By learning Polish, the students were not assimilating; they were equipping themselves with the tools to later tell their own stories.

This linguistic effort mirrors a larger project of “self‑reflection” described in Chapter 25 of the book. While studying European cinema, the students never abandoned their own histories. Instead, they activated “a potentially fruitful kind of dialectic between the particular and the universal, the here and the elsewhere, the past and the present.” The school’s international environment – with students from India, Morocco, Mexico, and beyond – fostered a collective consciousness that historian Vijay Prashad calls “the Third World project.” The filmmakers saw themselves as part of a global movement, not isolated artists.

2. Form as Weapon: Violence, Hunger, and the Refusal of Exoticism

The student shorts repeatedly used radical formal choices to challenge both colonial imagery and the conventions of Polish art cinema. Three examples illustrate how this cinematic decolonization operated.

Born in Chains (John Alex Maina Karanja)

In this Kenyan‑themed film, a child named Karanja discovers chains coiled beneath snow. The visual metaphor – chains hidden in a white landscape – directly evokes centuries of enslavement and racial oppression. As described in Chapter 19, the filmmaker uses color not as exotic backdrop but as the subject itself: “color is both the subject and a visual value.” The film refuses the orientalist gaze that had long reduced Africa to a picturesque setting. Instead, it forces the Polish viewer to see the presence of colonial violence within a supposedly neutral snowy world.

Without Requiem (Raul Saucedo Zermeño)

Set in Venezuela, Without Requiem depicts a political assassination covered up by authorities who tamper with the corpse to imply a crime involving homosexuals. The film ends with the protest song “We Shall Overcome,” transforming the short into an anthem of resistance. The use of documentary‑style footage and explicit violence aligns with Rocha’s “aesthetics of violence” – a deliberate strategy to shock the audience into political consciousness. The film also criticizes the collusion of state institutions (the rector who “sinks his teeth into the student’s skull”) with wider systems of oppression.

The Cat Died of Hunger (José María Sánchez Ariza)

This Mexican student film presents a destitute couple and their child, their only decorative object a portrait of Emiliano Zapata. An inter‑title gives the Larousse definition of “hunger,” directly engaging with Rocha’s concept of an “aesthetics of hunger” – using poverty as both subject and method to force recognition of systemic inequality. The film dialogues with Brazilian Cinema Novo works like Barren Lives, insisting that hunger is not natural but the product of colonialism and neocolonial exploitation.

These films reject the “double exoticism” that the book’s editors describe – the tendency to treat non‑European cultures as strange or picturesque. Instead, they politicize the image, making the camera a tool for “counter‑information” and “destruction” of colonial stereotypes.

3. Theoretical Dialogue: Third Cinema from Łódź to the Tricontinental

The student filmmakers were not working in isolation; they actively engaged with Third Cinema theory. Chapter 25 reveals that Idriss Karim sent a letter from Łódź to the Moroccan journal Souffles – the same journal that published the Arab translation of Solanas and Getino’s manifesto. Karim wrote that he shared their views and called for a debate on The Hour of the Furnaces and on “Third World cinema, a cinema of combat.” His own film Children of Haouz and the works of Derkaoui and Lagtaa explicitly advocate for a “committed cinema,” one that rejects both Hollywood (First Cinema) and conventional European auteur cinema (Second Cinema).

Yet these filmmakers did not simply imitate the Argentine manifesto. They adapted it to their own contexts. Mostafa Derkaoui’s films such as Cellar People and Somewhere, Someday transpose the atmosphere of Latin American student unrest into a Polish setting, creating a counter‑cultural space that questions authority. Abdelkader Lagtaa’s title‑giving short But Hope Is of a Different Color (1972) – a symbol in the book – uses color as both aesthetic and political marker. The film’s title itself suggests that hope must be redefined according to each struggle, not imported from the West.

The book also documents how these filmmakers navigated censorship. When political activists were hunted, they used walls as “the medium for free expression” – as seen in Shadow among Others. The filmmakers understood that under blocked political fields, cinema became a form of guerrilla communication.

Complexity and Contradiction

The Third Cinema project at Łódź was not without tensions. First, the school itself was part of the Polish state apparatus, which often suppressed dissent. Students were under constant surveillance by secret services. Many shorts had to pass through political gatekeepers. Some filmmakers, like Idriss Karim, had to balance their revolutionary ideals with the reality of studying in a country that rejected Guevarism as “heretical” (as noted in Chapter 25 about the Leipzig festival rejections). Second, the very act of representing the “Third World” from a Polish institution risked a new kind of exoticism. The book’s symbol of “Double Exoticism” addresses this: even well‑intentioned films could reproduce the gaze they sought to escape. Third, the filmmakers themselves came from very different political contexts – from Mexico’s student massacres to Morocco’s post‑independence crackdown – yet they all shared the label “Third World.” The book does not flatten these differences but instead shows how each filmmaker crafted a specific visual language for their own struggle.

Finally, the relationship with the school’s instructors, especially Wanda Jakubowska and Wojciech Has, meant that students worked within Polish aesthetic traditions (social realism, poetic surrealism). The result was a hybrid cinema – neither fully “Third World” nor fully “Polish” – that enriched both film cultures. As Chapter 19 concludes, these shorts brought “non‑Slavic protagonists, echoes of student protests in Paris and of Latin American student revolts, and a youthful non‑European socialist idealism” into Polish cinema, while simultaneously giving their creators a platform to assert new national narratives.

5 Study Questions and Answers

1. How does the film Lesson 41 by Abdellah Drissi function as an act of decolonization?
Answer: The film shows foreign students learning Polish through repetition of syllables and recitation of Mickiewicz. By mastering the colonizer’s language in an Eastern‑bloc context, these students reclaim the act of speaking and representation. It is a step toward breaking the silence imposed by colonial education systems.

2. In what ways do the student shorts reject ‘double exoticism’?
Answer: Instead of presenting African, Arab, or Latin American cultures as picturesque backdrops, films like Born in Chains and Without Requiem make color, violence, and hunger central subjects. They force viewers to see structural oppression rather than mere difference, using techniques drawn from Third Cinema manifestos.

3. How did the Łódź Film School both enable and constrain the Third Cinema project?
Answer: The school provided professional training, access to equipment, and an international community. However, students faced surveillance, censorship, and pressure to conform to Polish aesthetic models. Many had to navigate these constraints by encoding political messages in allegorical or symbolic forms.

4. What is the relationship between Glauber Rocha’s “aesthetics of hunger” and the student films?
Answer: Rocha argued that hunger and violence should be depicted not as misery but as creative forces. Films like The Cat Died of Hunger adopt this by showing poverty as a political dilemma rather than a natural condition, citing inter‑titles that define hunger and referencing Zapata’s legacy.

5. Why was the term “Third World” considered a ‘project’ rather than a place?
Answer: As historian Vijay Prashad notes, the Third World was a political aspiration for liberation and solidarity, not a geographical label. The student filmmakers embraced this idea, connecting their local struggles to global decolonization movements, as seen in their use of protest songs and references to the Tricontinental Conference.

Further Exploration