The Red Paper 1996

Directed by Dana Claxton

The Red Paper asserts a voice of power and interpretation recounting the devastating consequences of colonialism. The European male wears a straitjacket, repeatedly mumbling “I did not know, I did not know,” in a familiar contemporary mantra that pleads self-proclaimed absolution from guilt by reason of ignorance of history. Claxton irreverently and consciously opts for a lack of historical specificity in favour of a totalizing haunting by history in the present.