Sarah Maldoror
Originally an analog slide show made for two projectors, this work recounts the making of Sarah Maldoror's lost and surely never-to-be-seen first film Guns for Banta.
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).
Documentary about Colombian artist Ana Mercedes Hoyos, which deals with slavery and Afro-Caribbean cultures.
Some teenagers sign up for the contest: "Describe your neighborhood", whose first prize is a trip to Milan. As the youngsters are football fans and fans of Milan AC, they decide to describe the neighbourhood with a rap song, and record a video. Archie Shepp, who also lives in the neighbourhood, watches them and decides to give them a hand.
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.
Exploring the extraordinary contributions of women filmmakers from Africa and the diaspora, Beti Ellerson’s engaging debut intersperses interviews with such acclaimed women directors as Safi Faye, Sarah Maldoror, Anne Mungai, Fanta Régina Nacro and Ngozi Onwurah with footage from their seminal work. With power and nuance, Ellerson also confronts the thorny question of cultural authenticity by revisiting the legendary 1991 FESPACO (Pan-African Festival of Cinema and Television of Ouagadougou), in which diasporian women were asked to leave a meeting intended for African woman only. This film is both a valuable anthology and a fitting homage to the pioneers and new talents of African cinema.
In this documentary about Reunion Island, Maldoror begins with a look at an exhibition by sculptor Alain Seraphine, with automated drumming machines and other installations. From there, she goes out into the island, showing a communal eco-stovetop program, art and music classes for children, and parts of the island’s animation industry, all creative outlets and opportunities for the people.
„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“.
Bokolo and Mamadou, sweepers in the city of Paris, are looking for a way to pay for the return home of one of their sick comrades. When they find an old book of recipes in the trash, they discover a passion for French cuisine and decide to participate in a televised cooking competition.
Documentary short that explores the meaning of the locals’ African identity through the Carnival festivities.
Short piece for the TV series Aujourd'hui en France [Today in France]. The review of an exhibition by Miró at the Maeght Foundation offers the opportunity to approach the surrealist artist from the filmmaker's central themes: the theatre, the interrelationship between the arts and the transformation of the childhood experience through art. The ensemble is like a work by Joan Miró translated into real life. This is its first screening after its television premiere in 1980. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Sarah Maldoror uses Carnival as her approach to the history of colonization and black culture.
Documentary about Cape Verde and the island of Fogo produced by the revolutionary government of the new country. A culture learning to live without tutelage.
There is a gap separating the surrealism from the Interwar period and that of the post-war era, and that is the way this movement would understand racial difference. At first, the other or "primitive" was the opposite of the bourgeois subject. In this documentary, Sarah Maldoror interviews one of the most influential surrealist poets from the former surrealism, while at the same time we witness the movement's anachronist views regarding the affirmation of other identities.
Documentary on the négritude movement through one of its founders, Aimé Césaire.
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.
Domingos is a member of an African liberation movement, arrested by the Portuguese secret police, after bloody events in Angola. He does not betray his companions, but is beaten to death in prison, and not knowing he is dead, his wife goes from a prison station to another, trying in vain to know where he is.
Guns for Banta is the first feature-length film by Sarah Maldoror. Shot in Guinea-Bissau, Guns for Banta follows the life and untimely death of Awa, a countrywoman involved in the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC).
Festival panafricain d'Alger is a documentary by William Klein of the music and dance festival held 40 years ago in the streets and in venues all across Algiers. Klein follows the preparations, the rehearsals, the concerts… He blends images of interviews made to writers and advocates of the freedom movements with stock images, thus allowing him to touch on such matters as colonialism, neocolonialism, colonial exploitation, the struggles and battles of the revolutionary movements for Independence.
“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.
Tracing the struggle of the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale to gain freedom from French colonial rule as seen through the eyes of Ali from his start as a petty thief to his rise to prominence in the organisation and capture by the French in 1957. The film traces the rebels' struggle and the increasingly extreme measures taken by the French government to quell the revolt.
