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Owen 'Alik Shahadah is a master of the Documentary format and progressive African scholar. Shahadah uses film for social revolution. |
A multi-award winning recipient including the rare UNESCO award for his critically acclaimed film on slavery 500 Years Later..
He is best known for authoring works, which deal with African history, social justice, environmental issues, education and world peace. He states his primary motivation for making these films was being frustrated with "Tarzan's voice" as the central narrator in African stories. He noted that while scholarship challenges these issues, the common knowledge of the majority is generally unaltered, writing alone is not enough, the ultimate tool for re-education on a mass level is film. 
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Not all words spoken were created equal: Some words come from a mind that has studied, from a body that has traveled a 1000 miles, from eyes that have witnessed, from a tongue that has eloquence, from a heart that has passion and from a soul that has sincerity |
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'Alik Shahadah |
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Shahadah states that: Knowledge, is limited by the information received; diminished or enhanced by the conditioning of the mind which processes the information. And therefore believes the African mind must be conditioned by new paradigms. Born in Germany, of African-Caribbean heritage, and educated in both the UK and the Caribbean, Shahadah is of a new generation of African Diaspora filmmakers inspired by the likes of Malcolm X, Che Guevera and Kwame Nkrumah. He produces work that articulates a multidimensional African world perspective. Testimony to this is 500 Years Later and his new production Motherland. As a scholar and writer he is an expert in African slavery, Arab slave trade, and African culture. He is also known for his seminal paper on Linguistics and a New African Reality.
* Al Akhbar Interview
* Al-Jazeera