Goodbye Uncle Tom

Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971)

Addio zio Tom

300 years of hate explode today!

Two documentary filmmakers go back in time to the pre-Civil War American South, to film the slave trade.

Date of release
1971-09-23
TMDB
6.6 / 10 (76)
Runtime
2h 3m
Genres
Drama, Documentary
Director
Gualtiero Jacopetti, Franco Prosperi
Collection
Mondo Cane Collection

Casting

Interesting facts

Goodbye Uncle Tom is a 1971 Italian mondo docudrama co-directed and co-written by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi with music by Riz Ortolani. Based on true events, the filmmakers explores the United States during the Antebellum South, using period documents to examine in graphic detail how racism became a legal loophole to justify the degrading conditions faced by the enslaved Africans and African Americans after the slaves' conversion to Christianity, in order to protect the plantation economy in the Southern United States. Due to the use of published documents and materials from the public record, it is labeled a documentary, though nearly all footage is restaged using actors.

Production

The film was shot primarily in Haiti, where directors Jacopetti and Prosperi were treated as guests of Haitian dictator Papa Doc Duvalier. Duvalier supported the filmmakers by giving them diplomatic cars, clearance to film anywhere on the island, as many extras as they required, and even a weekly dinner with Duvalier himself.

Scenes were also shot in the U.S. states of Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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