Sarah Maldoror & Mario de Andrade

Zurich Filmpodium - Sarah Maldoror: Poesie und Militanz
2025-08-25 20:30 - 2025-09-30 20:00 (Europe/Paris) | Film Pdium, Zurich, 8001, Switzerland

LAUSANNE - 19 ème Festival Cinémas d'Afrique
2025-08-14 08:00 - 2025-08-17 17:00 UTC
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A full-scale retrospective of Sarah Maldoror at MoMA
2025-05-01 19:00 - 2025-05-15 19:00 UTC
MoMA presents a full-scale retrospective of Sarah Maldoror (1929–2020), the first of its kind in North America, celebrating the pioneering French filmmaker whose work gave voice to the anti-colonial independence movements of Angola and Guinea-Bissau; who observed the rich cultural traditions of carnival, music, and poetry in Martinique, Haiti, Guyana, and Cape Verde, as well as the experiences of African immigrants in France; and whose friendships with influential authors and political thinkers like Jean Genet, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Marguerite Duras situated her at the heart of French avant-garde theater and the Négritude movement and led to remarkably vital film collaborations. The exhibition premieres eight new restorations, including her debut short Monangambééé (1968) and her groundbreaking Sambizanga (1972), likely the first feature to have been directed by a woman in sub-Saharan Africa. Also premiering are a great many other works long believed lost or destroyed for political reasons and rescued from obscurity by Maldoror’s daughter Annouchka de Andrade in a 20-year-long act of cultural preservation. Tracing Maldoror’s entire career, the retrospective also features a number of films on which she assisted, including Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), Ahmed Lallem’s Elles (1966), and William Klein’s Festival panafricain d’Algier (First Pan African Cultural Festival, 1969).
Born Sarah Ducados to a French mother and a Guadelopean father in rural southwestern France in 1929—her childhood was one of relative penury after her parents’ deaths—she moved alone to Paris, and by the 1950s had immersed herself in literature, political activism, and experimental theater. There she adopted the nom de plume (and nom de guerre!) Maldoror after a proto-surrealistic novel by the 19th-century poet Lautréamont; partnered with the poet Mario Pinto de Andrade (who would become one of the founders of Angolan nationalism); and formed the first all-Black theater company, Les Griots, notable for giving substantial roles to Black performers and for premiering Jean Genet’s Les Nègres to great success and controversy. Maldoror’s first film as a director, Monangambééé, a collaboration with Mario de Andrade and Serge Michel featuring a jazz score by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, was radical for a variety of reasons, not least for envisioning the brutality of Portuguese colonial violence. Co-produced by Algeria barely seven years after the country’s independence and six years before the independence of Angola, Monangambééé, together with Sambizanga, marked an extraordinary awakening of political consciousness and resistance, particularly as seen through the eyes of a female character. These films, and Maldoror’s career as a whole, have become lodestars for artists like Alice Diop, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, Euzhan Palcy, and Jonathan Demme.
Organized by Annouchka de Andrade, independent curator, and Joshua Siegel, Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.

Exhibition Black Planet
2024-12-15 08:00 - 2025-03-30 17:00 UTC
Pan-Africanism, first named and theorized around 1900, is commonly regarded as an umbrella term for political movements that have advanced the call for both individual self-determination and global solidarity among peoples of African descent. It has yet to be fully examined as a worldview that takes its force from art and culture.
As the first major exhibition to survey Pan-Africanism’s cultural manifestations, Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica gathers together some 350 objects, spanning the 1920s to the present, made by artists on four of the world’s seven continents: Africa, North and South America, and Europe. Panafrica, the promised land named in the exhibition title, is presented as a conceptual place where arguments about decolonization, solidarity, and freedom are advanced and negotiated with the aim of an emancipatory future. Rather than a stable and defined territory, the exhibition maps Panafrica as a shifting and boundless constellation that transforms and reassembles standard representation of the planet.

In fact, many artists featured in the exhibition have creatively redrawn the map of Africa or the world: Yto Barrada (Paris, born 1971, lives in Tangier), Kerry James Marshall (Birmingham, born 1955, lives in Chicago), and Abdoulaye Ndoye (Dakar, born 1951, lives in Dakar. Others, including David Hammons (Springfield, IL, born 1943, lives in New York), Edith de Kyndt (Ypres, born 1960, lives in Berlin and Brussels), Chris Ofili (Manchester, born 1968, lives in Port of Spain and London), and Kawira Mwirichia (Nairobi, 1984–2020), have made flags which correspond to no official nation but rather imagine a transnational solidarity.

Framing the individual artworks in the exhibition are the ideas of three influential 20th-century cultural and political movements—Garveyism, Négritude, and Quilombismo—that offer competing visions of a Black Planet, all of them premised on a great contrast with the world we all inhabit today. Further exhibition spaces in Project a Black Planet spotlight debates around Blackness, inner life, political and psychological agitation, and the role of ancestors and spirituality.
The center of the exhibition, meanwhile, turns around an extensive display of books, magazines, record albums, and ephemera which have helped circulate ideas of resistance and self-invention worldwide since the early 20th century. Together this expansive presentation—artworks from across the globe in nearly every media—prompts questions and invites visitors to grapple with and participate in Pan-Africanism’s calls for equality and social transformation.
Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica is curated by Antawan I. Byrd, associate curator of Photography and Media, Art Institute of Chicago, and assistant professor of Art History, Northwestern University; Elvira Dyangani Ose, director, Museu d’art contemporani de Barcelona; Adom Getachew, Professor of Political Science and Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity, University of Chicago; and Matthew S. Witkovsky, vice president for strategic art initiatives and Sandor Chair of Photography and Media, Art Institute of Chicago.
SPONSORS
Lead foundation support for Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica is generously contributed by the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris.
Major support is provided by The Chauncey and Marion Deering McCormick Family Foundation, Hilary and Gidon Cohen, the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation (EHTF), the Artworkers Retirement Society, the Council for Canadian American Relations, The Opatrny Family Foundation, the Lewis and Susan Manilow Fund, and Gary Metzner and Scott Johnson.
This exhibition is made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.
Members of the Luminary Trust provide annual leadership support for the museum’s operations, including exhibition development, conservation and collection care, and educational programming. The Luminary Trust includes an anonymous donor, Karen Gray-Krehbiel and John Krehbiel, Jr., Kenneth C. Griffin, the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris, Josef and Margot Lakonishok, Ann and Samuel M. Mencoff, Sylvia Neil and Dan Fischel, Cari and Michael J. Sacks, and the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation.
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Sarah Maldoror - An Alternative Identity (Tapies Foundation)
2024-10-25 08:00 - 2024-10-27 17:00 UTC
The season of films Sarah Maldoror. An Alternative Identity responds to the need to network with the city’s institutions to develop a de-localised programme and the desire to highlight a pioneer of African film like Sarah Maldoror, who left us a wonderful legacy on the subject of negritude. The season sets out to revisit Maldoror’s work, as a figure as yet little-known but essential in dealing with the decolonial movement and struggles for social diversity. The four sessions, designed by the Museu Tàpies with the special support of Annouchka de Andrade, the film-maker’s daughter, will set out from Maldoror’s visual poetics to portray a future society rooted in anticolonialism and pan-Africanism.
Sarah Maldoror (Condom, France, 1929 – Fontenay-lès-Bris, France, 2020) is considered the first black woman to make a feature-length film in Africa and represents a key figure in world and revolutionary cinema, firmly and unabashedly anti-racist. Over several decades, her prolific body of work includes more than forty films that combine fiction and documentary in the broadest sense of the term. Altogether it is a kind of poetry dedicated to translating the black cultural, social and political movement into images and sound.
The seminar, with the participation and collaboration of the Filmoteca de Catalunya and the Institut Français de Barcelone, will invite film critics, activists and sociologists to help to construct a fruitful dialogue around concepts like colonialism, social justice and migration, but will also deal with broader terms in connection with possession, baggage, heritage or identity.
The films to be screened in this season are: Monangambé, Ana Mercedes Hoyos, the Carnival trilogy (Carnaval dans le Sahel, Fogo, l’île de feu, Carnaval en Guinée-Bissau), Aimé Césaire, le masque des mots and Sambizanga.

Sarah Maldoror - An Alternative Identity - Cataluña cinematek (Barcelona)
2024-10-01 08:00 - 2024-10-02 17:00 UTC
The season of films Sarah Maldoror. An Alternative Identity responds to the need to network with the city’s institutions to develop a de-localised programme and the desire to highlight a pioneer of African film like Sarah Maldoror, who left us a wonderful legacy on the subject of negritude. The season sets out to revisit Maldoror’s work, as a figure as yet little-known but essential in dealing with the decolonial movement and struggles for social diversity. The four sessions, designed by the Museu Tàpies with the special support of Annouchka de Andrade, the film-maker’s daughter, will set out from Maldoror’s visual poetics to portray a future society rooted in anticolonialism and pan-Africanism.
Sarah Maldoror (Condom, France, 1929 – Fontenay-lès-Bris, France, 2020) is considered the first black woman to make a feature-length film in Africa and represents a key figure in world and revolutionary cinema, firmly and unabashedly anti-racist. Over several decades, her prolific body of work includes more than forty films that combine fiction and documentary in the broadest sense of the term. Altogether it is a kind of poetry dedicated to translating the black cultural, social and political movement into images and sound.
The seminar, with the participation and collaboration of the Filmoteca de Catalunya and the Institut Français de Barcelone, will invite film critics, activists and sociologists to help to construct a fruitful dialogue around concepts like colonialism, social justice and migration, but will also deal with broader terms in connection with possession, baggage, heritage or identity.
The films to be screened in this season are: Monangambé, Ana Mercedes Hoyos, the Carnival trilogy (Carnaval dans le Sahel, Fogo, l’île de feu, Carnaval en Guinée-Bissau), Aimé Césaire, le masque des mots and Sambizanga.
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Screens: A Panafrica Film Series (Chicago)
2024-08-10 08:00 - 2025-01-06 17:00 UTC
For modern and contemporary artists working between Africa and the diaspora, film and photography have been tremendously important forms of creative expression.
The six moving-image makers featured in Screens share the planetary hopes of Pan-Africanism, a set of bold visions first developed before 1900 that have galvanized global struggles for freedom and solidarity ever since.
The films underscore the great attention paid by African and African diasporic contemporary artists to legacies of the 1950s and ’60s. In those decades, people of African descent worldwide achieved unprecedented gains in national sovereignty, cultural expression, and political recognition. That heyday of decolonization and civil rights sharpened Pan-African imaginations: fostering visions of contemporary self-affirmation, on the one hand, and on the other, a global connectedness for Black people.

Studio portraiture and photojournalism both assumed great prominence in these decades, whether by offering empowering representations of ordinary subjects or shedding light on struggles for justice and human rights. In 1969, meanwhile, filmmaker Sarah Maldoror (1929–2020) produced her first short film, Monangambééé, which captured the essence of struggles for equality in the nation of Angola.

The film contributed to broader discourses about the role of the moving image in shaping Pan-African activism and cultural expression. Maldoror’s twin emphases on popular will and personal self-invention reverberate in the films presented in this series, as they address the past and the popular as intertwined sources for inspiration and as a means to envision our shared world.
The following films will be screened during the exhibition run (a screening schedule will be announced before the opening):
Sarah Maldoror, Monangambééé (1969)
Sarah Maldoror, And the Dogs Fell Silent (1978)
Larry Achiampong, Relic Traveler: Phase 1 (2017)
Mónica de Miranda, Pathway to the Stars (2019)
Zarina Bhimji, Out of Blue (2002)
Sammy Baloji, AEQUARE: The Future That Never Was (2023)
Steffani Jemison, The Meaning of Various Photographs to Tyrand Needham (2009–10)
Surrounding the screening room, a film-like ribbon of approximately two dozen studio and press photographs shows scenes of public life from the mid-20th century and more recently.
Screens: A Panafrica Film Series is curated by Antawan I. Byrd, associate curator of Photography and Media, Art Institute of Chicago, and assistant professor of Art History, Northwestern University; Adom Getachew, professor of Political Science and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, University of Chicago; and Matthew Witkovsky, Richard and Ellen Sandor Chair and Curator, Photography and Media, and vice president for strategic art initiatives.
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