The North American actor, Danny Glover, who is going to make a movie about the Haitian revolutionary, Toussaint Louverture, is coming up against problems with European and US producers. They have doubts that a movie whose hero is a person of African descent, will sell adequately in Europe and Japan.

“You can’t imagine the number of producers who I’ve talked to in the US and Europe. They would say to me, ‘it’s a great project’ and immediately after ‘Is it a film about blacks?’ Glover said.

You could call it racism, and you could call it cultural imperialism. We live in an age where media and culture is dominated by the US, and usually the ‘white upper-class’ sector of it.
Music, TV, Movies, Fashion, the Internet are all dominated by US industry.
Even in Australia actors must take on American accents to be successful and in Japan the most successful actors and actresses are tall and ‘white’, with large eyes- despite this being quite contradictory to the biological norms there.

Glover needs 30 million dollars to complete production of the film. 18 million of those will be provided by the Venezuelan Villa de cine.

Louverture was an ex slave who led the Haitian revolution, which was eventually repressed by Napoleon in 1802 as he sent 20,000 soldiers to ‘control’ the insurrection.

”I grew up in a society in which the ‘indian’ was bad and the white was good, and my background is part American-Indian, by my mother and my grandmother,” Glover said. “And in the first movies in which I saw Africans, they were depicted as savages. I wanted to have another vision.”

Glover is right, but is another vision profitable or sellable?