‘Der Golem’ is a German UFA film from the expressionist period, between the two major world wars, and as well as representing a historical setting with racial turmoil, it also reflects the current state of a country in which Anti-Semitic sentiment was reaching a ground swell in a financially crippled Germany. As such, the Golem, culturally at least, represents a form of protection for the Jewish people in what would prove to be one of the hardest centuries in history for them.

On the other hand, there is ‘Malcolm X’, named for and based on the revolutionary figure in the African-American and Muslim-American communities, which rather than harkening to a fantasy of a time separated by hundreds of years, tells the story of a man who only died around thirty years before the film’s release. This shows how current and persistent the societal issues which bred the film’s creation had remained since Malcolm’s time, and on a larger scale, since the Transatlantic Slave trade, and the Colonial era.