Store
Film review by The People’s Minister of Information JR
“My name is Camelien” is one of the few times when the preteen boy speaks while he is in captivity in the film “Shortage of Children,” which will be screening at the San Francisco Black Film Festival on Saturday, June 16, 5:45 p.m., at the African American Art and Culture Complex in the Buriel Clay Theater, 762 Fulton St., San Francisco.
The film is in French with English subtitles and is set primarily in France, beginning in 1963. Two children from Reunion Island, a French colony – now called a “departement” – that lies east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean were among 1,600 children from the island brought to France for forced adoptions by farmers to repopulate the countryside. Their mother gave them to a white couple who promised her they would make them doctors but in the end enslaved them.
The approximately 40-minute film takes some dramatic twists and turns, and it definitely will be a topic of discussion at the festival. When I watched “Shortage of Children,” I picked up on a lot of subtle messages.
For example, it looked at the similarity between cold, hard, blunt, violent white supremacy that was dished out by the enslaving white male character and the liberal white supremacy of the white woman. Ultimately, they both led to the same end game. The children were destroyed and needless to say never set free.
The 10-year-old Black boy slept in a barn with the cattle. He was physically intimidated and beat up by his male enslaver. He was constantly ridiculed and reprimanded by his captors and the society – the white society – that they lived in.
Camelien’s little sister Lenais, only 5, wasn’t really discussed, but it was evident that her fate was no better than her brother’s. They both were enslaved and had no one but their captors to depend on. They dealt with it in very different ways.
The white female character in the film was a liberal who programmed the enslaved girl to call her mother. The white woman character’s relationship with the girl’s brother was very different.
“Shortage of Children” will be screening at the San Francisco Black Film Festival on Saturday, June 16, 5:45 p.m., at the African American Art and Culture Complex in the Buriel Clay Theater, 762 Fulton St., San Francisco.
This movie represents the colonized babies being tortured and degraded for their whole lives and, if they are able to survive, returning to who they “used to be” and feeling alien to that reality.
The conclusion of the film made me look at how we, African people in the diaspora, are colonized when looking at our own roots in the South, in the Caribbean, in Latin America and in Africa, and how we see ourselves as more American than we do African. We would rather identify with slave-masters than with our “primitive” relatives and ancestors who have been distanced from us through colonial education and media.
World War III is beginning between our ears, or is it still World War I from our perspective?
Check out more great films like this at the San Francisco Black Film Festival June 14-17.
The People’s Minister of Information JR Valrey is associate editor of the Bay View, author of “Block Reportin’“ and “Unfinished Business: Block Reportin’ 2“ and filmmaker of “Operation Small Axe“ and “Block Reportin’ 101,” available, along with many more interviews, at www.blockreportradio.com. He can be reached at blockreportradio@gmail.com.
