Whoever calls our age a postcolonial one, talks about past and present. The preconditions of the present globalisation, the prehistory of our economical and cultural global society that is a divided one still, are expressed in it. The term "postcolonial" points at the effect of colonial relations without claiming that we still live in a colonial age.The prefix "post-" does not show that something has been overcome and left behind, but that the colonial experience is reflected in the present.

The postcolonial present is a present of migration; it is the present of migrant workers and fugitives who look for a better possibility of survival in the centres of economic prosperity. They tell stories about the postcolonial experience – about attempts to step out of the neocolonial dependence and to take the promises of freedom seriously: the promise of wealth by work, the promise of equality and the announcement of having overcome rascism and of only seeing it as a historical relic of a blinded age. They have to realize that these promises are not equally valid for everyone and finally that they are not as universally meant as they are propagated.

Postcolonial discourses – as initiated by the Anglo-American cultural studies that are now slowly making their way into the social and cultural studies here – are also conducted in films, when these are telling stories about the migrants’ diaspora cultures, as for example, in films like Claire Denis’s "Ich kann nicht schlafen" (J´ai pas sommeil/I Can´t Sleep, France 1994) or  in the satire "East is East" (East is East, UK 1999) by Damien O’Donnell or in Fatih Akin’s "Kurz und schmerzlos" (Short Sharp Shock, Germany 1998). Or when they describe the life of working migrants as in "Marie-Line" (Marie-Line, France 2000) by Mehdi Charef that tells us about the every day life of a cleaning staff in a French supermarket.

`East is East´ by Damien O´Donnell

It is peculiar that the postcolonial films are not set on the territories of the former colonies, but mostly in the wealth centres of the West where not everyone shares just this wealth that attracts everyone. Instead of showing the authentic world of the South – which has often been expected from these so called "Third World Films" – the protagonists of these films comment on the West where they end up as workers. Thus, we learn something from them – about our own world that we only know from our restricted point of view. The point of view of those cleaning the supermarkets at night is just as strange to us as an unknown country. A strange look is also cast on our country by those who live here illegally and who are bereft of all security and all rights – a look that is only so very strange because the experience of illegality is certainly one of the taboos in our time that – as a rule – believes itself free from taboos.

The borders between the worlds are no longer territorial or nation state. One world jugs out into the other. Therefore, we can no longer talk about films from "the South" or from the "Third World". Postcolonial films can be set anywhere where the vagabonds of the globalised, capitalised conditions try to organize their survival. "The "Third World" does not really disappear in the process of standardisation of the world market, but it enters into the "First World" as ghettos, hutments or favelas, is produced and reproduced again and again", write Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt in "Empire". Conversely, the "First World" pushes into the "Third" with its transnational combines and banks. Thus, the world market is the territory of postcolonial existence.

Postcolonial discourses are also discourses of remembrance and historical assessment. They add a new theme to the necessary discussion on the remembrance of the crimes against humanity, a theme that leads a shadow existence especially in the historical consciousness here – the remembrance of the crimes of the colonial age. The genre of documentaries gives a forum to the postcolonial remembrance work that has only just started in our latitudes and still gets very little acknowledgement. Raoul Peck’s first film from 1991 "Lumumba – La Mort d’un Prophète" (Lumumba: Death of a Prophet, France/Switzerland/Germany 1991) is simply a perfect example of a postcolonial remembrance discourse. It starts off in Brussel’s subways and always comes back from the Congo to the streets of Belgium, to the present of a superficial lack of history under whose disguise the colonial crime is only made visible cinematically. Raoul Peck’s poetic comments confront us with the grief for a loss that has not been mourned for.

Another way to reconstruct colonial history has been found by the film "Little Senegal" (Little Senegal, Algeria/France/Germany 2001) by Rachid Bouchareb. True, the protagonist tries to reconstruct his family and is taken back to the times of slavery, to the places of deportations and forced labour. But in the end, his search leads to the present. And thus, the film tells about people in "Little Senegal" in the centre of New York, about the descendants of slaves who are – according to their own self-understanding – Americans, but are not accepted as those, about their attempts to leave behind everything that is African and reminds them of the history of their humiliation. The living conditions of Afro-Americans of today are traced from the perspective of their African origins and the destructive consequences of slavery. The Franco-Arabian director Bouchareb reflects on the promise of relationship and the fragility of the African cultural heritage.

Films are media of remembrance and they form moving and non-closed archives of a cultural memory. But this memory is subject to global power relations. Postcolonial films investigate the historical experience of colonial rule, interfere within a partial memory and demand an assessment that has considerably been avoided up till now. Films like "Lumumba" draw our attention to marginalised pasts. I see them in the context of a discussion that has started and will hopefully become more important – a discussion on the European memory frame as it is advanced by the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka who sees the remembrance of the transatlantic slave trade and the colonial crimes as an "affair that has not been attended to between Africa and Europe" and who requests a consideration of the policy of reparation in this domain where he sees a "convincing criticism of history".

Cinema is full of stories that are about the efforts to belong to those places where life is easier, more agreeable and more comfortable. Stories that are about the efforts to get away from those places where life is only possible by means of endless fights – or hardly possible at all. Films that tell stories about postcolonial experiences do this in a very subtle way and without a certain message. They just tell the story of the conditions and the art of survival, but in this story something of the global relations is reflected.

"Ali Zaoua" (Ali Zaoua, Marocco 2000) ) by Nabil Ayouch takes us to the streets of Morocco where the 12 year old chemkaras – children living on the street – organize themselves in gangs, where competing gangs meet who have their own laws. "Ali Zaoua" is also a film on life with actors who really are these children in Casablanca.

"Blinder Passagier" (De Verstekeling, Netherlands 1997) by Ben van Lieshout begins in Uzbekistan, but is set in the Netherlands where Orazbaj arrives as a stow away believing he is in America. Happy coincidences help him find a place with a family for who the stranger starts to be part of in a nearly fairy tale manner. Van Lieshout contrasts the coldness of illegal migration to a relationship that is however ended by the authorities by means of deportation. In the end, it is not a fairy tale at all.

`De Verstekeling´ by Ben van Lieshout

In "Black Dju Dibonga" (Black Dju Dibonga, Belgium/Portugal 1995) by Pol Cruchten, 20 year old Dju is looking for his father who lives in Luxembourg as a docker and only comes to Kapverden once a year to visit his family. We participate at a guided tour through Luxembourg and see the places of the migrant workers, the building sites and accommodation halls where everybody lives thinking of a different place. It is a film about people whose strengths and qualities are not needed in the world they live in. They are strangers and outsiders. And yet, these films do not accuse the false world. It is not a question of success or failure, of rescue or decline. The protagonists’s attitudes are the important thing. They rebel – nearly gently – against the conditions, they are disillusioned, but neither cynical nor resigned.

The films mentioned above confront us with our own conditions of life. They are no media that let us leap easily over borders. But they rather awake us to these borders. True, we have seen how some children live in the streets of Morocco, but we do not really know about it and the film does not claim having enlightened us on the subject. True, we have seen how somebody arrives in an unknown county without any connections to it at all. But the film does not claim having informed us on the subject. It merely told us a story – without any proof for its authenticity. No fixed and predictable moral message is conveyed because no stereotypes – be it victim or perpetrator – are created. Rather, we see people who do not fit any given stereotype because they are at the wrong place at the wrong time and because they assumed that this place had to be better than the one they come from. Thus, Orazbaj in "Blinder Passagier" leaves his Uzbekistan home at the Aral Lake that is 70% dried up which makes life extremely hard for the people living there. In the Netherlands, the protagonist meets people with totally different problems, troubles and desires and he concludes: "It is not so different here. And actually, it cannot get any worse."

If films are windows to the world that make it possible that we see something in our province that is beyond our province, then it is the ideal medium in the age of globalisation. But not because they show us the world, but – paradoxically – just because they deny us the illusion of taking part in the experience of others and of believing that other people’s struggles are our own. They deny us the attitude of tourists who think they can always be everywhere and see things as they are. Within our zone – the Western world – we are all potential tourists who live in time and who fill time to be successful in time. Thus, we differ from the others who are tied to certain space and who leave it out of misery and needs, not to see the world, but to survive. Zygmunt Bauman calls them "vagabonds". Film is no touristic event. Wherever its story leads to we find ourselves still in the cinema – from the beginning until the end. And when the lights go on, we are back in Neustadt instead of Marakesh. Thus, film offers the possibility to initiate a process of education and reflection. (And cinema offers better opportunities than TV because a film is watched collectively in the cinema and can therefore initiate communication at a given time.) The conditions of our perception, the province out of which we see the world form the context of these processes. Contrary to the message of a world in a global network, cinematic experience can become an experience of a zone. The zone represents a territory whose borders mark our horizon. The zone shapes our point of view, leaving many things strange and incomprehensible; it is restricted and surrounded by the privileges of a secure existence. It is the zone where the stories of vagabonds have their entertainment value because, in the first place, the audience does not run the risk of becoming such vagabonds themselves. The zone of the audience – cinema audience and even more so TV audience – is a zone of safety. Thus, it is fundamentally different from the zones that are depicted on screen. This difference is the context of an education that contrasts the announcements of the "One World" with the experience of the divided world. It is about a certain attitude of criticism, e.g. a certain negation, contrary to every appeasing promise of having reached a better condition. Our perspective is restricted by our privileged position as early industrialised countries. I have tried to describe these restrictions with the term "zone". Zone is no metaphor, but a term that points at our own context. Our privileged position determines the point of view from which we are regarding films of the South and films about postcolonial migrants. In this, film shows a paradoxical structure: as film is a medium of illusion, it does not leave us in the dark as far as the illusionary nature of our participation at the protagonist’s fate, at their fights, their failures and their happy moments is concerned. The illusion machine becomes the medium of disillusion. At the end of the film, we are confronted with the conditions of our seeing. This can be the starting point of communicative education processes that, however, do not come up by themselves, but need stimulation and modification. They need a setting that promotes reflexion and that allows an exchange on the experience of seeing.

Films are often used in youth and adult education to overcome borders and to bridge the gap between the divided world. But I think that films confront us with exactly this gap and point at the division of the world. Films leave us in our own zone. They confront us with the postcolonial situation in which nothing simply mixes and not everyone is connected. A situation in which all the differences are not extinguished in a multi-cultural society, but a situation of divided worlds and broad gaps between the poor and the rich, the South and the North. But the division of the world can be right in one and the same country. Nowhere have I seen this reflected more clearly than in the film "Nachtgestalten" (Nightshapes, Germany 1999) by Andreas Dresen. Laconically, Dresen tells the story of survival artists in Berlin, the unforgettable story of the little employee Peschke who – without wanting to and very reluctantly at the start – is looking after an African boy who has not been fetched from the airport. A Berlin night becomes the scene of big and small troubles, breaking of rules and unconventional encounters. Dresen says that this film reflects the polarisation of our society in the indication of neoliberalism. Dresen’s principle concerning a social critical film seems to be that one has to love the characters to portray them true to life. For most of the people that we meet in this night in Berlin, life is quite arduous, exhausting, and dangerous. They permanently lose something. What they gain is only very short and transient. The film does not accuse, but it pleads for the presence of these people in the city and seems to say: they are the city, they give a face to the city. Thus I understand "Nachtgestalten" also as a plea against the clean city.

`Nachtgestalten´ by Andreas Dresen

To see films as a medium for education processes often generates the misunderstanding that this is all about using films didactically so that it corresponds to the underlying educational idea. But this would miss seeing films as an artistic product and has an absolutely deterrent effect not only on cineasts. On the contrary, films unfold their own impact and should not be hidden under pedagogical concepts. Moreover, it shows a distorted understanding of education if education is seen as a problem of mediation. On the contrary, I see education processes more like processes of irritation and self reflexion that is born out of this irritation, not meaning an inner psychological self beholding, but an analysis of your own integration into power relations.

Film as an artistic medium has lost nothing of its popularity. Also, the so called triumphant advance of the new media has not driven the traditional film into the background. Film - with its various means of expression and narration - can be the kick-off to education processes or an encounter with its border. Border maybe because the artistic message evades communication and understanding, cannot be explained or imparted, but is only experienced in a peculiar moment which denies description.

For those who include films in the education of youths and adults the question is how the educational contexts themselves are to be described. The places of education are no longer the classical places of learning processes. TV and cinema are places where views of life are searched for and found. Consequently, many institutions of adult education have moved to the cinema. To see cinema as a place of adult education requests a sensitivity for the setting of this place. In the "One World Cinemas" that have been created in some cities, I see an approach in trying to realize this. Teachers teaching adults and film freaks meet here to shape the arthouse cinema. In doing this, they try to invite to an examination of the films by means of introductions and discussions – without using the film merely instrumentally. The cooperation between those whose profession it is to initiate education processes and those drawing up cinema programms is full of tension and therefore productive because everyone is confronted with their own restrictions. It is a tread on a tightrope – between aesthetic criteria, content related and thematic interest and communicative matters. How all this is to be mediated together makes an interesting aspect of public education concerning film. Furthermore, this work demands spontaneity – agreeing to an audience that – as a target group – is unpredictable and coincidental. The fact that completely different people than those expected are attracted by a film is the charm of a film presentation. But the work of an "One World Cinema" has also a political side within the battlefield of the media market. Film people organize film series that have little chances on the international market and can only become visible in arthouse cinemas. Films from Africa, but also from Latin America, East and Middle Europe and Central Asia – from the 2/3 world – belong to this group. Cinema is fragmentary instead of global, it is zonally privileged and restricted, and it regulates and distributes its products on the market, but not according to artistic criteria. If glimpses into the film creation of the non-Western world shall be made possible, then a special commitment to these films is necessary. Otherwise, we also stick to our province of seeing in TV and cinema and we will not even be confronted with the views and camera shots of other social contexts and experiences. A commitment for films of the 2/3 world and the artists creating it is at the same time a commitment to aesthetic differences, to the experience of differences in production, shooting, rapidity and slowliness. Prerequisite to this commitment is a consciousness for the unequality that is reproduced by mainstream cinema and that is disguised in its exclusion practices because nobody realises that something is missing. If films shall move education processes, more than an aesthetic and content related interest is needed: a political commitment in the divided world of the media market.