RETROSPECTIVE
SARAH MALDOROR
Organised in collaboration with Filmoteca de Catalunya
When
From May 23rd to June 25th
Where
To invoke the name of the filmmaker Sarah Maldoror is to bring back to life The Songs of Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror), the 19th-century French surrealist text from which the young filmmaker took her artistic name. With this statement, Maldoror set out the meaning of her entire oeuvre: to bring the avant-garde to the fore from the ideals of negritude. As her daughter Annouchka de Andrade explains, Sarah Maldoror always answered the phone with the question: ‘Ready for the revolution? The French filmmaker of Antillean origin transferred this spirit to her way of understanding cinema, which was always anti-colonial and feminist.
Sarah Maldoror (1929-2020) was a vital figure in understanding the cultural and political movement of negritude, political activist, poet, mother, feminist, filmmaker and dramaturge. In 1972 she directed Sambizanga, which portrayed the anti-colonial struggle in Angola, becoming one of the first women filmmakers to work in sub-Saharan Africa. Though well-noticed, Sambizanga is only a small part of Maldoror’s prolific oeuvre. From the 1970s to 2009, she directed some fifty pieces for film and television.
Thanks to the efforts of Annouchka de Andrade and the restoration work carried out by organisations such as the Cineteca di Bologna, the World Cinema Foundation and the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée, it has been possible to recover her filmography. These films are shown in this extensive retrospective of her work.
Full program available in catalan↗