Sarah Maldoror Movies

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

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...

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.

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...

This modest portrait of the fashion designer Emanuel Ungaro seems to mark a departure from Sarah Maldoror’s usual subjects, but it nonetheless reveals her abiding fascination with the sensuality of the creative act.

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...

Maldoror reports on a painting exhibition of the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam at the Artcurial gallery in Paris in 1980.

Saint-Denis-sur-Avenir describes the problems faced by works in one of Paris’s working-class suburbs.

Exploring the extraordinary contributions of women filmmakers from Africa and the diaspora, Beti Ellerson’s engaging debut intersperses interviews with such acclaimed women directors as Safi Faye, Sarah Maldoror, Anne Mungai, Fanta Régina Nacro and Ngozi Onwurah with footage from their seminal...

Originally an analog slide show made for two projectors, this work recounts the making of Sarah Maldoror's lost and surely never-to-be-seen first film Guns for Banta.

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

Documentary about Cape Verde and the island of Fogo produced by the revolutionary government of the new country. A culture learning to live without tutelage.

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.

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.

A portrait of Haitian singer Toto Bissainthe, whose musical journey is marked by her desire to disseminate creole singing.

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

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...

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...

Guns for Banta is the first feature-length film by Sarah Maldoror. Shot in Guinea-Bissau, Guns for Banta follows the life and untimely death of Awa, a countrywoman involved in the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC).

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.