Sarah Maldoror

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.

Broadcast from 1977 to 1987 on FR3, every Sunday morning, for 1h30, Mosaïque is a variety show with a set where music groups from the countries of origin of immigration perform, and which broadcasts reports on these countries and on immigrants who live in France. When it was created, it aimed to promote the cultures of origin of immigrants, but also to make them better known to the rest of the population. However, the program was never financed by public television which considers that it was aimed at a specific audience and was therefore not part of a public service mission. It received financial support from the Ministry of Labor, through its subsidy to the National Office for the Cultural Promotion of Immigrants, ONPCI (later becoming Information Culture and Immigration, ICEI, in 1977, then Agency for the Development of Intercultural Relations , ADRI). , in 1982).

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.

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.

No synopsis available yet.

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.

No synopsis available yet.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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

First staged in Krakow and the Gdansk shipyards in 1980, where Poland’s Solidarity movement was born, and here performed at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris, Wielopole, Wielopole by the theater company Cricot 2 merges themes of Christ’s Passion and fascism with the Polish director Tadeuz Kantor’s own childhood memories.

Sarah Maldoror observes a stage production of Paul Claudel’s The Hostage at the Théâtre de la Comédie in Reims.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this segment on immigrant cultures for the television program Mosaïque, a young Senegalese woman who cooks in a workers’ hostel dreams of traveling throughout France and getting to know her adopted country, taking issue with the cliché of the impoverished and helpless immigrant.

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.

Sarah Maldoror uses Carnival as her approach to the history of colonization and black culture. Carnival is understood here as a festivity during which the limits are transgressed, the world is circumnavigated, and the dominator becomes the dominated, in addition to being an explosion of music and sensations, a great collective performance in which the characteristics of négritude-identity comes forth.

Documentary short that explores the meaning of the locals’ African identity through the Carnival festivities.

Sarah Maldoror documents the opening of the Théâtre Noir de Paris, a Négritude-inspired theater company and cultural association dedicated to artists and performers from Africa and the French Antilles.

Documentary about Colombian artist Ana Mercedes Hoyos, which deals with slavery and Afro-Caribbean cultures.

Sarah Maldoror interviews women of different nationalities who serve as “public” writers, linking French administrative bodies with people who cannot speak or write French.

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.

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.

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.

In this report on an annual conference known as RIFEN, Black women from around the world gather to discuss points of common interest and need, including community leadership and shared experiences of migration and transplantation.

Commemorating the 1986 Tunis-Paris exhibition Privileged Spaces and Times: French-Speaking Intellectual Production in Tunisia, Sarah Maldoror’s film points the way toward a more polyvocal understanding of the role of France’s National Library worldwide.

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.

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 Senegalese man of the film’s title is Léopold Sédar Senghor, the poet and first president of Senegal, who is remembered by his neighbors in Normandy.

Portrait of the French painter-etcher, lithographer and director.

Sarah Maldoror finds inspiration in the hidden corners of Paris, where architecture was shaped by foreign styles and influences.

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.

Sarah Maldoror reports on Christiane Diop, editor of the publishing house Présence africaine, which includes an interview with illustrator Sophie Mondesir, about her work as the first black woman to run a major publishing house in Paris.

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.

A portrait of the famous photographer, shot for his 1987 exhibition at the musée d’art et d’histoire de Saint-Denis.