Colonialism is often described through maps. Territories change colour, borders move, empires expand and eventually disappear. Cinema has the ability to do something history books and maps cannot always achieve so immediately: place us inside the human relationships created by those systems of domination.
The five films in this selection approach colonialism from remarkably different geographical and cinematic perspectives. They take us from Portuguese plantations in São Tomé and Dutch-controlled Indonesia to the Spanish Empire in South America, the violent occupation of Tierra del Fuego and the dispossession of Aboriginal communities in northern Australia. Their stories stretch across different centuries and colonial powers, yet similar ideas continually resurface: land is taken, labour is exploited, racial hierarchies are constructed, violence is justified as civilisation, and those responsible develop languages and institutions capable of making brutality appear normal.
What makes these films particularly interesting is that none treats colonialism simply as historical scenery. In Banzo, The Settlers, Sweet Dreams, Zama and High Ground, colonialism determines who possesses the land, who controls another person’s body, whose version of history survives — and even who is permitted to imagine a future.
1. Banzo (Portugal, 2024)
Perhaps the least widely known film on this list is also one of the most unsettling.
Margarida Cardoso’s Banzo takes us to 1907, when Portuguese doctor Afonso arrives on an African island to work on a plantation. He is confronted with workers suffering from what the colonial authorities describe as banzo: an extreme homesickness associated with Africans torn from their homes, a condition that can result in starvation and suicide. The afflicted workers are isolated on a hill, where Afonso is expected to find a medical solution.
The premise immediately reveals the perversity of the colonial logic. The system has displaced, exploited and traumatised human beings, yet when the consequences become impossible to ignore, their suffering is transformed into a medical problem to be solved.
That perspective makes Banzo particularly valuable. Cardoso does not need to make colonial violence constantly explicit because it is embedded in the plantation itself: in the division of labour, in the organisation of bodies and in the assumption that Europeans have the authority not only to control African workers but also to define what is happening inside their minds.
There is something almost ghostly about the film. Colonialism becomes a system haunted by what it has done, even if those administering it remain incapable of fully recognising the damage.
The setting is especially significant. Filmed partly in São Tomé and Príncipe, Banzo confronts a chapter of Portuguese imperial history that has received considerably less international cinematic attention than British, French or Spanish colonialism.
And its central question is devastatingly simple: how can you cure someone’s suffering without acknowledging the system that caused it?
2. The Settlers (Chile, 2023)
The opening landscapes of The Settlers are magnificent. That beauty soon becomes disturbing.
Set in Tierra del Fuego at the beginning of the twentieth century, Felipe Gálvez’s debut follows three horsemen sent across Patagonia by a wealthy landowner. Officially, their task is to mark out his property and establish a route towards the Atlantic. The language sounds administrative, almost harmless.
What follows exposes what those words can conceal.
The expedition becomes part of the violent occupation of Indigenous territory and the persecution of the Selk’nam people. At the centre is Segundo, a mestizo Chilean marksman travelling alongside Scottish lieutenant Alexander MacLennan and American mercenary Bill.
The Settlers is especially effective at dismantling the vocabulary traditionally associated with colonial expansion. Words such as settlement, property, progress and civilisation acquire very different meanings when seen from the perspective of the people already inhabiting the supposedly empty territory.
Land is fundamental here. The enormous landscapes initially appear untouched, but the film gradually forces us to reconsider what we are seeing. The idea of an empty frontier is itself a colonial construction: the land can only be described as available once its existing inhabitants have been rendered invisible.
Gálvez also complicates the perspective through Segundo. He is neither comfortably positioned among the colonisers nor entirely outside their expedition, and his presence exposes the racial hierarchy operating even among the men carrying out the violence.
The later passages of the film introduce another essential question: who gets to write the official version of what happened?
Violence establishes colonial power, but narratives can preserve it. The Settlers understands that controlling history can be almost as important as controlling territory.
The Settlers also appeared in our selection of Five Essential Films from Chile, where we explore how Felipe Gálvez’s debut fits within a national cinema that has repeatedly confronted questions of history, memory and political violence.
3. Sweet Dreams (The Netherlands, 2023)
Colonialism becomes something very different in Sweet Dreams.
Instead of the severe landscapes and overt violence of The Settlers, Ena Sendijarević gives us saturated colours, carefully composed frames and an atmosphere so strange that the film sometimes resembles a colonial fever dream.
Set on an Indonesian island during the final period of Dutch colonial rule, the story begins when Jan, the Dutch owner of a sugar plantation, suddenly dies. His widow Agathe wants to preserve the family’s position, while their son Cornelis arrives from Europe expecting to inherit the plantation. Complicating everything is Siti, Jan’s Indonesian housekeeper and concubine, whose position within his will threatens the family’s assumptions about ownership and inheritance.
We have already discussed Sweet Dreams individually on Other Kind of Movies, and it deserves to return here because few recent films have approached European colonialism with such a peculiar mixture of satire, cruelty and visual beauty.
Sendijarević understands that colonialism was not maintained exclusively through soldiers and governments. It also existed inside homes.
Who prepares the food? Who sleeps where? Who serves whom? Who owns the house? Who owns the plantation? Who inherits it?
These apparently domestic questions expose an entire political system.
Renée Soutendijk’s Agathe embodies a particularly revealing form of colonial entitlement. Her world is collapsing, yet she behaves as though the privileges sustaining it are simply part of the natural order. The brilliance of the film’s satire lies in watching Europeans attempt to preserve that order even as everything around them demonstrates its absurdity.
Siti, played with remarkable restraint by Hayati Azis, occupies an entirely different position. She understands the mechanisms of the household because she has spent years living inside them, yet her apparent lack of institutional power does not mean she is without agency.
The result is colonialism viewed not through conquest but through intimacy.
And sometimes that is even more uncomfortable.
4. Zama (Argentina, 2017)
If Sweet Dreams turns colonialism into satire, Lucrecia Martel turns it into a state of mind.
Based on Antonio di Benedetto’s celebrated novel, Zama follows Diego de Zama, an eighteenth-century official of the Spanish Crown stationed in a remote South American outpost. He desperately wants to be transferred. He waits for a letter from the King that might release him from his provincial existence.
The letter does not arrive.
Governors come and go. Years pass. Zama remains.
That description hardly communicates how strange Zama actually feels.
Martel does not present the Spanish Empire through spectacular battles or heroic explorers. Her colonial world is humid, bureaucratic, ridiculous, oppressive and strangely stagnant. Officials discuss status and procedure while Indigenous people and enslaved Africans move through spaces Europeans imagine they control.
Daniel Giménez Cacho’s Zama is particularly fascinating because he occupies both sides of the colonial hierarchy. As an official of the Crown, he possesses authority over others. Yet within the imperial bureaucracy he worships, he is insignificant.
He wants recognition from a system that barely notices him.
That contradiction gradually becomes the film.
Martel’s sound design and unusual compositions constantly destabilise our sense of where attention should be directed. People appear at the edges of frames. Animals wander unexpectedly into scenes. Conversations overlap. The supposedly dominant Europeans frequently seem less in control of their environment than anyone else.
There is an extraordinary irony to all of this. Colonialism justified itself partly through ideas of order and civilisation, yet Martel portrays the colonial administration as confused, vain and profoundly absurd.
Among the five films here, Zama may be the least conventional representation of colonial power. There is no simple division between oppressor and victim around which the narrative is organised. Instead, we are trapped inside the consciousness of a man whose identity depends completely upon the empire that is slowly destroying him.
The empire controls territory.
But it also colonises the imagination of those who serve it.
5. High Ground (Australia, 2020)
High Ground brings us to Australia’s Northern Territory and confronts colonialism through a form closely associated with territorial conquest: the Western.
Or, as director Stephen Maxwell Johnson has preferred to describe it, the “Northern.”
The film begins with a massacre of Aboriginal people by white policemen and settlers. Years later, former First World War sniper Travis becomes involved in the pursuit of Baywara, an Aboriginal warrior resisting colonial authority. At the centre of the conflict is Gutjuk, a young Aboriginal man whose personal history connects the violence of the past with what is happening in the present.
The choice of genre matters.
Western cinema has spent more than a century creating myths around frontiers, settlers and supposedly untamed landscapes. High Ground turns many of those conventions around. The frontier is not empty. The people described as obstacles to civilisation have their own families, languages, laws and relationships with the land.
And the arrival of colonial authority is not the beginning of history.
It is an interruption of it.
The film was developed in close consultation with Yolngu communities, and its Aboriginal cast includes performers such as Jacob Junior Nayinggul and Witiyana Marika alongside Simon Baker and Jack Thompson.
Where Zama emphasises bureaucracy and Sweet Dreams domestic hierarchy, High Ground makes the physical violence underpinning colonial occupation impossible to ignore. Guns, police authority and racial assumptions combine to create a system in which violence can subsequently be described as law enforcement.
But the film is equally interested in memory.
The massacre at the beginning is not simply an event that happened and ended. It changes the people who survive it and shapes the conflicts that follow. Colonial violence therefore becomes intergenerational, passing from one moment to another long after those responsible would prefer to consider the past closed.
These films could hardly look more different.
Banzo is haunted and melancholic. The Settlers is austere and brutal. Sweet Dreams uses satire and visual excess. Zama transforms empire into an existential nightmare. High Ground appropriates the language of the Western to challenge the mythology of the frontier.
Their geography is equally broad: Africa, South America, Southeast Asia and Australia. Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and British colonial histories intersect with very different Indigenous experiences.
Yet watching them together reveals how often the same mechanisms appear.
Colonialism requires more than conquering territory. It needs stories capable of justifying conquest. Land becomes empty. Indigenous people become obstacles. Exploitation becomes employment. Massacres become pacification. Cultural destruction becomes civilisation. Those who benefit from the system eventually learn to regard their position not as privilege, but as normality.
That is why cinema can be so valuable when returning to these histories.
A film can reverse the perspective.
It can ask who was standing outside the official photograph, who disappeared from the written account, who actually owned the supposedly unoccupied land, who harvested the sugar, who was expected to remain silent — and who decided what would later be remembered.
Banzo, The Settlers, Sweet Dreams, Zama and High Ground do not simply take place during colonialism. They examine the structures that made colonialism possible and the memories it left behind.
Empires eventually disappear from maps.
Their consequences rarely disappear with them.
