Memory's Gaze

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).

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

Léon G. Damas (1912–1978) was the first poet to “live Négritude”, according to the Senegalese poet, politician and cultural theorist Léopold Sédar Senghor. Cosmopolitan and always in transit, his writing is a chorus of melodies and imagery imbued with angst and melancholy and strongly influenced by jazz and blues. Punctuated by images of the landscapes of French Guiana and the voice of the artist, the film exemplifies the poetic documentary form to which Maldoror frequently returned.

Paratrooper commander Colonel Mathieu, a former French Resistance fighter during World War II, is sent to Algeria to reinforce efforts to squelch the uprisings of the Algerian War. There he faces Ali la Pointe, a former petty criminal who, as the leader of the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale, directs terror strategies against the colonial French government occupation. As each side resorts to ever-increasing brutality, no violent act is too unthinkable.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For the France 3 show, Mosaïque, Sarah Maldoror met Assia Djebar on Sunday March 29, 1987 on the occasion of the publication of her book Ombre Sultane. She discusses the status of the traditional woman in the Arab Muslim world: "The woman is always on the move, she is never anchored. To the extent that she is always in the process of repudiation, she is in the process of leaving. With Ombre Sultana, I wanted to make the reader feel that these women from elsewhere are like her, even if the reader is Western.

Documentary on the négritude movement through one of its founders, Aimé Césaire.

Short piece for the TV series Aujourd'hui en France [Today in France]. Reporting on a Joan Miró exhibition at the Maeght Foundation, Sarah Maldoror enjoys filming the Spanish painter and sculptor engaging with children during a theatre piece. The filmmaker's central themes are in full bloom here: 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.

In this short piece, fledgling editors, reporters, and illustrators describe their work on Point Virgule, a newspaper by and for young people, including publishing articles on racism.