Virtual: Screening & Director Talk: The Aryans

In honor of Black History Month, the Center for European Studies is partnering with UNC faculty Dr. Priscilla Layne for a virtual screening of the film The Aryans and live virtual talk with director Mo Asumang. The Aryans is a documentary in which an African-German gets to the bottom of right-wing movements worldwide — and their completely wrong interpretation of “Aryanism.” Director Mo Asumang is an acclaimed filmmaker, actress and tv presenter, well known in Germany due to her brave documentary movies and TV moderation.

About the Film

The Aryans is a documentary in which an African-German gets to the bottom of right-wing movements worldwide – and their completely wrong interpretation of “Aryanism” — a phenomenon of the tall, blond and blue-eyed master race established by the French philosopher Gobineau, It went on with the Nazis, and still promotes hate and racial murders today. Filmmaker Mo Asumang sets out for a tour de force into the abyss of the political evil in Germany and the US. She travels to places where the real Aryans originally came from an area which is now part of Iran. The Aryans is a personal journey into the madness of racism during which she meets German neo-Nazis, the US leading racist, the notorious Tom Metzger and Ku Klux Klan members in the alarming twilight of the Midwest.

Speakers

Mo Asumang is an acclaimed filmmaker, actress and tv presenter, well known in Germany due to her brave documentary movies and TV moderation. Recently she has gained international exposure being featured in Roman Polanski`s movie “The Ghostwriter” playing Condoleezza Rice, being featured in an “article by USA TODAY which linked President Obama and Mo Asumang as ‘kindred souls’, and being compared in the media to filmmaker Michael Moore, and through her work leading workshops and lectures about racism and social integration in Universities and Schools in Germany, African countries, across USA and Europe. Since the beginning of her career as a TV moderator in Germany in 1996, she has became a well known cultural figure and has taken on a successful career as both producer, writer, actress, and film director as well as moderator. In recent years Mo has dedicated her many talents and her energy to creative activism in the field of racism. Her new documentary The Aryans (2014) is a personal journey into the madness of racism during which she meets German neo-Nazis, the US leading racist, the notorious Tom Metzger and Ku Klux Klan members in the alarming twilight of the Midwest. In The ARYANS Mo questions the completely wrong interpretation of “Aryanism” — a phenomenon of the tall, blond and blue-eyed master race.

Priscilla Layne (moderator) is associate professor of German in the Department of German and Slavic Languages and Literatures; and adjunct associate professor of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Professor Layne has guest lectured at Tübingen University and at the University of Bremen. Prof Layne focuses on sci-fi, cinema, and Black culture in Germany and Europe. Her first book, White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture was published in 2018 by the University of Michigan Press. She is also the co-editor of the volume Rebellion and Revolution: Defiance in German Language, History and Art (2008). She is currently working on a monograph, Out of this World: Afro-German Afrofuturism. She held a Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin in fall 2018. She has published articles on German film, literature, translation and music in German Studies Review, the Women in German Yearbook and Colloquia Germanica. Prof Layne is on the Board of the German Studies Association and vice president of the American Association of Teachers of German.

Registration is required.