Fogo, fire island

Documentary about Colombian artist Ana Mercedes Hoyos, which deals with slavery and Afro-Caribbean cultures.

“Monangambeee” was a rallying cry used by activists during Angola’s anti-colonial liberation struggle to gather villages together. The film of the same title addresses Portuguese arrogance towards Angolan culture. Sarah Maldoror draws on a novella by José Luandino Vieira, the story of a political prisoner, to make a film about humiliation, solidarity and resistance.

The filmmaker Sarah Maldoror films the writer Édouard Glissant at the Fort de Joux (in the Jura), in the cell where the Haitian general Toussaint Louverture was held prisoner until his death in 1803. She then talks to Aimé Césaire at Le Diamant in Martinique, in front of Laurent Valère's "Cap 110" memorial. The documentary also includes short interviews with Roland Suvélor and Madeleine de Grandmaison, and the reading of texts performed by Greg Germain.

based on the novel of Akli Tadjer, "Les A.M.I du Tassili"

A short animation about motion and poetry.

A film by Sarah Maldoror

Documentary short that explores the meaning of the locals’ African identity through the Carnival festivities.

For 'Et les chiens se taisaient' Maldoror adapted a piece of theatre by the poet and politician Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), about a rebel who becomes profoundly aware of his otherness when condemned to death. His existential dialogue with his mother reverberates around the African sculptures on display at the Musée de l'Homme, a Parisian museum full of colonial plunder whose director was the Surrealist anthropologist Michel Leiris.

„Sarah Maldoror […] is respectfully regarded as the matriarch of African cinema (she was the first woman of color to make a feature film). For her, filmmaking was a weapon for struggle and liberation from the very beginning of her experiences in cinema.“ (African Film Festival New York, Biograpy Sarah Maldoror) Her film Toto Bissainthe portraits the Haitian singer and actress of the same name. Along with the likes of Samb Makharam or Timité Bassori, Maldoror and Bissainthe were part of the 60’s ensemble of renowned theatre group „Les Griots“.

Shortly after his death in 2008, Maldoror made this film about her longtime friend and collaborator, the Négritude poet Aimé Césaire. In this film, she retraces the steps of Césaire’s travels across the globe — particularly back to his hometown in Martinique, where Maldoror interviews his relatives about his life — and her working relationship with Césaire, including fragments of her previous films about him, Un homme, une terre (1976) and Le masque des mots (1987).