And the Dogs Were Silent

Are even the best and brightest revolutionary movements doomed to inevitable compromise, betrayal and failure? That question haunts this documentary, a biography of Angolan-born Mário Pinto de Andrade (1928–1990), a key figure in African revolutionary and anti-colonial struggles.

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).

Alternating interview segments, shots of Martinique landscapes and scenes from Aimé Césaire's play La Tragédie du roi Christophe (1963), Sarah Maldoror portrays her friend as a politician, a poet, and a founder of the Négritude movement.

A story of political imprisonment set in a mental hospital where the Stalin state police placed whoever their opponents were.

Former petty criminal Ali la Pointe becomes a commander of the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale, directing a guerilla insurgency against the colonial French occupation. Paratrooper commander Colonel Phillippe Mathieu, a veteran of World War II and the First Indochina War, is sent to Algeria to reinforce efforts to squelch the uprisings.

Domingos is a member of an African liberation movement, arrested by the Portuguese secret police, after bloody events in Angola. His wife goes from a prison station to another, trying in vain to find out where he is.

Guns for Banta is the first feature-length film by Sarah Maldoror. Shot in Guinea-Bissau, it follows the life and untimely death of Awa, a countrywoman involved in the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). Financed by the Algerian army, which hoped to turn it into a propaganda tool, the film was confiscated from Maldoror because of her demands for full control over the editing. To this day the reels have not been identified or returned.

Filmmaker-griot coming from the theater, it was with a camera, while the war in Vietnam occupied everyone's minds, that Sarah Maldoror gave visibility to the African wars of decolonization: Angola, Guinea Bissau, French Guinea, Cape Verde... Her short film Monangambée addresses the torture by the Portuguese army of a sympathizer of the Angolan resistance. At the end of editing, Sarah Maldoror approached the members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago during a Parisian concert and offered to add sound to her film. The next day they watched the film, were convinced and recorded their first soundtrack for free as evidence of African-American solidarity. Shot in Algiers, Monangambée is a film about torture and, more broadly, about the incomprehension between the colonized and the colonizers. It is based on a novel by the Angolan writer Luandino Vieira, then imprisoned by the Portuguese colonial power.

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.

Film dedicated to Toto Bissainthe, the Haitian singer that Sarah Maldoror also filmed at an earlier stage. Here, the magic of cinema is summoned and the cinema of the Lumière brothers and other figures that marked the seventh art is revisited.

The Mozart Residence is home to several "new owners" of all origins: a new concierge, Paco, of Spanish origin, who has just been released from prison, arrives at the residence. Around it, the hall and the mailboxes, the "ballet" of the Residence Mozart is organized.

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.

Aimé Césaire - Le Masque des mots is a portrait of the Martinican writer who calls himself a rebellious negro and for whom the poetic act represents an act of freedom.

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.

Omar, a young Franco-Algerian from La Garenne-Colombes, decided to spend his vacation in the country of his ancestors, Algeria. On his return, he boards the ferry “Le Tassili” and during the crossing, he meets people who share his doubles, in a good mood that does not hide their heartbreaks.

Sarah Maldoror’s camera roams the famous flagstones and foliage of Père Lachaise, visiting its nooks and cats, to the sound of poems such as Liberté, by Paul Éluard.