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

Monangambee, Aimé Césaire – Le Masque des mots and Léon G. Damas are three films, three journeys into the heart of négritude poesy and Sarah Maldoror’s cinematic universe. With Aimé Césaire – Le Masque des mots Sarah Maldoror meets the poets Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor in Miami. Sarah films their meeting of minds and attuned gestures. Césaire’s verses spin in the skytrain and when the poet Maya Angelou, deeply moved, recites his poetry under the branches of a willow tree, the film takes on its full scope. Poetry is a vibrant material and Sarah finds pleasure in working with it. In Léon G. Damas, filmed in 1994 in Guyana, the poet’s verses flow from Maroni to the Seine accompanied by the rhythm of the jazz. Throughout the film, Maldoror questions transmission – both that of négritude pioneer poets and of Guyanese history, which builds itself between the past pain of slavery and a future dominated by science. Today young people no longer know Guyanese poets, homeless people have settled in the penal colony of Cayenne and Kourou is home to the European space station. For Maldoror, poetry and education are inseparable from emancipation; they run through all of her films, starting with her first work Monangambee. I wholeheartedly thank the Cineteca di Bologna for this tribute that will, like a rocket, take Sarah’s films towards the stars.

Annouchka de Andrade

Monangambee, Aimé Césaire – Le Masque des mots and Léon G. Damas are three films, three journeys into the heart of négritude poesy and Sarah Maldoror’s cinematic universe. With Aimé Césaire – Le Masque des mots Sarah Maldoror meets the poets Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor in Miami. Sarah films their meeting of minds and attuned gestures. Césaire’s verses spin in the skytrain and when the poet Maya Angelou, deeply moved, recites his poetry under the branches of a willow tree, the film takes on its full scope. Poetry is a vibrant material and Sarah finds pleasure in working with it. In Léon G. Damas, filmed in 1994 in Guyana, the poet’s verses flow from Maroni to the Seine accompanied by the rhythm of the jazz. Throughout the film, Maldoror questions transmission – both that of négritude pioneer poets and of Guyanese history, which builds itself between the past pain of slavery and a future dominated by science. Today young people no longer know Guyanese poets, homeless people have settled in the penal colony of Cayenne and Kourou is home to the European space station. For Maldoror, poetry and education are inseparable from emancipation; they run through all of her films, starting with her first work Monangambee. I wholeheartedly thank the Cineteca di Bologna for this tribute that will, like a rocket, take Sarah’s films towards the stars.

Annouchka de Andrade