Hope and Solidarity Across Boundaries: The Fragile Persistence of a Different Colour

Thematic claim: a fragile yet persistent colour

In Hope Is of a Different Color, the title metaphor—drawn from Abdelkader Lagtaa’s student short film—names a fragile yet persistent belief: that genuine solidarity can transcend political, cultural, and racial boundaries, and that cinema can be a tool to envision a more just world. This thematic claim is woven through the book’s account of filmmakers from the Global South who studied at the Łódź Film School between the 1960s and 1990s. Their student shorts, biographies, and later careers reveal both the hopeful promise of transnational co‑operation and the contradictions—racism, censorship, surveillance—that made that hope so delicate.

Part 1: Moroccan filmmakers and the school of critical empathy

Chapter 31 of Hope Is of a Different Color follows three Moroccan directors—Mostafa Derkaoui, his brother Abdelkarim Derkaoui, and Abdelkader Lagtaa—from Casablanca to Łódź and back. At the film school they absorbed a social‑documentary ethos from Polish instructors, especially the teaching of Kazimierz Karabasz. Lagtaa later recalled that “in Poland we learned that social themes are important: you cannot disregard people’s living conditions.” This training inspired them to point “a critical gaze at Moroccan reality.”

Their student films embodied the thematic claim. Lagtaa’s But Hope Is of a Different Color (1972) centres on a Roma family, showing them both on stage and at home—drinking coffee, bickering, living ordinary lives. The title suggests that hope, though different from what the state or society might expect, endures in the dignity of marginalised people. Similarly, Derkaoui’s The Adoption (1968) uses a direct‑cinema approach to expose racial prejudice: a mixed‑race girl in an orphanage is twice rejected by a couple because of her skin colour. The film’s freeze‑frame on the sleeping child conveys silent indictment, not despair—a hope that such injustice will be seen.

The filmmakers’ own lives were tangled in the contradictions of Cold‑War solidarity. Chapter 31 details their activism with the Moroccan Communist Party and their return home after a promise of official protection, only for Lagtaa to be deported to Algeria. The promise of solidarity from the socialist bloc was genuine in educational opportunity, but it could not protect them from political expediency.

Part 2: The familiar and the strange—documenting marginalisation

Chapter 21, “The Familiar, the Strange,” analyses how foreign students’ documentaries turned a lens on Polish society itself. By choosing subjects like workers, single mothers, orphans, and ethnic minorities, these directors “unveiled the transnational nature of selected phenomena.” Rather than simply depicting exoticism, they made the strange familiar and the familiar strange.

A key example is Anthropology (1982) by Djamel Benkhaled, which records race‑research based on physical characteristics. The film alternates clinical close‑ups with scenes of participants’ everyday lives, implicitly questioning the scientific framing of difference. A Nigerian character asks scientists what they are doing, and the answer—“to describe differences between people and investigate their causes”—sounds hollow when set beside the dignity of ordinary moments. The film’s quiet insistence on personhood over classification is a form of hope.

Reserved for Foreigners (1988) by Fayçal Hassaïri takes a more direct approach. It shows scholarship students in a separate dormitory, waiting for letters from home, isolated both from Polish peers and from each other. The voice‑over commentary, heard for the first time in such works, voices frustration with the “living conditions” of state‑sponsored education. Here, solidarity across boundaries is revealed as incomplete—offered but hedged with restrictions. Yet the act of making the film, of giving the students a platform, reasserts the belief that their situation ought to be different.

The evidence from chapter 21 also highlights how The Adoption by Derkaoui functions as a critique of the same system that brought these students to Poland. The orphanage employee shows the couple a dark‑skinned girl; the couple refuses, saying “it wouldn’t be the right arrangement.” The children in the orphanage are all victims of the same society that hosted the filmmakers—a contradiction that makes the hope of solidarity painfully fragile.

Part 3: Transnational protest and the Swahili feature

A third thread appears in chapter 19, which examines short films from the 1960s and 1970s. Idriss Karim’s Song for the Deaths of the Young (1973) uses surrealist imagery to link the student protests of 1968 with Third‑World liberation struggles. A column of protesters marches with a banner reading “we want the sun!” in several languages, and the film cuts to footage of police clashes worldwide. The title song, originally a tribute to Jan Palach, becomes a transnational elegy. This direct appeal to global solidarity is a rare overt expression of the hope that resistance can cross borders.

A different but equally powerful symbol is Forgotten Places, the first Swahili‑language 35mm feature, directed by São Gamba and August Agboola Obrown. The film was made at Łódź and later became a landmark of African cinema. Its very existence—a Swahili story shot in Poland, funded by a socialist state—embodies the book’s claim that hope can take an unexpected shape, a “different colour.” The film’s preservation in the school’s archive ensures that this fragile solidarity is not entirely forgotten.

Complexity: the hope that survived its own contradictions

The book does not romanticise transnational solidarity. The historians contributing to Hope Is of a Different Color repeatedly note that socialist Poland’s openness toward Global South students coexisted with racism, surveillance, and political manipulation. Chapter 5 documents how “xenophobia and racism, in particular for students from sub‑Saharan Africa” marred the experience of many, and how students occasionally died under mysterious circumstances in the Soviet bloc. The hope of a different world was fragile because the structures that enabled it were themselves imperfect.

Yet the book insists that this hope persisted. Authors Magda Lipska and Monika Talarczyk frame the film school as a site of “double exoticism”—a concept that can be both limiting and generative. The films made there were not simply imitations of Polish or Western models; they were acts of translation, carving out a space for marginalised voices within a foreign context. The title metaphor recurs precisely because it captures a conditional belief: hope may be of a different colour than expected, but it is still hope.

Study questions and answers

1. How does the student short But Hope Is of a Different Color exemplify the theme of fragile solidarity across ethnic boundaries?
   The film portrays a Roma family in both public performance and private moments, refusing to reduce them to exotic spectacle. By showing their everyday struggles—waking, drinking coffee, arguing—the director claims a shared humanity. The title proposes that solidarity with such a community is possible even when society labels it hopeless; the “different colour” of hope is the belief that respect can cross ethnic lines.

2. Why does The Adoption’s freeze‑frame ending matter to the theme?
   The freeze‑frame on the sleeping mixed‑race girl, after the couple has refused to adopt her because of her skin, crystallises the quiet indictment of racism. It does not provide a resolution; it holds the moment so that the viewer cannot look away. In doing so, it asserts that the hope for justice must be sustained even when the immediate outcome is rejection—a solidarity that refuses to give up on the child’s worth.

3. What contradictions in socialist solidarity does Reserved for Foreigners reveal?
   The film shows that international students were physically isolated in a separate dormitory, cut off from Polish society. They longed for letters from home and formed inward‑looking ethnic groups. This contradicts the official narrative of brotherhood. Yet the film itself, by giving the students a voice, reclaims the hope that such isolation should be temporary and that genuine exchange remains possible.

4. How does the Swahili‑language film Forgotten Places function as a symbol of transnational hope?
   The production of a feature in Swahili at a Polish film school demonstrates that political and cultural boundaries could be bridged through shared cinematic education. The film’s survival in the archive becomes a material trace of that bridge—a proof that the hope for a decolonised cinema was not only imagined but realised, however fragilely.

5. In what ways does the book’s account of the Łódź Film School complicate the idea of “hope” as a straightforward political emotion?
   The book records not only friendships and creative collaborations but also racism, surveillance, and political censorship. Students were sometimes treated as instruments of Cold‑war diplomacy, and their films were censored or lost. This messiness resists a simple narrative of triumphant solidarity. Instead, “hope” emerges as an active choice made by individuals who persisted in making critical art despite the system’s failures—a “different colour” precisely because it is stubbornly non‑utopian.