Sarah Maldoror shot her directorial debut Monangambee, a film set in the African continent, in 1969. It was co-produced by Algeria, barely seven years after the country’s independence and six years before the independence of Angola… She was accused of having made a ‘women’s film’ because she refused to ‘realistically’ show colonial violence, and torture in particular, instead inventing a technique that is at once poetic and clearly subversive-revolutionary, for it deconstructs several levels of colonial violence: physical brutality, racism, institutional domination, and the impossibility of communication in the colonial world. She also attacks, as Fanon did, the ‘epidermalisation’ of racism. The whole situation of imprisonment and torture is based around “le complet”, which can mean a three-course dish in Angola or a man’s three-piece suit in Portugal. It is as if the prisoner is not reproached for being rebellious and demanding inde- El arte del tabaco pendence or liberation, but rather for exchanging words with his wife in this misunderstood language. Like the misunderstood language of peoples colonised by colonisers.

Habiba Djahnine, Specters of Freedom – Cinema and Decolonization, edited by Tobias Hering and Catarina Simão, Berlin Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art and filmgalerie 451, Berlin 2018