Come Back, Africa (1959)

Director: Lionel Rogosin
Run Time: 83 min. 
Call Number: DT2405.J6557 C66 2014

"The dateline that opens Lionel Rogosin's Come Back, Africa reads 'Anno Domini 1959'—and the year is significant. Filming his exposé of apartheid in Johannesburg at the end of the '50s, Rogosin was capturing the transition in South African life from a decade that Anthony Sampson, editor of the legendary monthly Drum, called 'a unique period of opportunity and creativity'—and organized resistance—to the crackdown following the African National Congress treason trials, the 1958 prime ministership of Hendrik Verwoerd, and the Sharpeville Massacre of March 1960, during which police opened fire on black demonstrators and killed 69 people. . . . [W]hile filming, Rogosin's cover story for suspicious police was that he was shooting a harmless musical travelogue."
—Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice