A BFI season curated by Annouchka de Andrade on her mother’s work prompts questions about restoration, cultural memory, and the endurance of political art in an era of flattened aesthetics.
What’s the distinction between art and protest? According to James Baldwin in a 1984 interview with the Paris Review, there is none. Both exist within literature as a simultaneous expression of one’s engagement with the world. The same can be said for the mediums of film, theatre and poetry.
Sarah Maldoror’s work is art and protest. The French-born Guadeloupean director spent her storied career exploring the tensions between the two, examining the history and bloodied violence of colonialism across Africa – namely in Angola – and juxtaposing it with the breadth of African art, and her often intimate portraits of notable artists such as Guyanese poet and politician Léon-Gontran Damas. Early in her career, Maldoror worked as an assistant on the anti-colonial masterclass The Battle of Algiers in 1966, before starting work on her debut short film Monangambé in 1968. Monangambé would seek to unearth the routine abuse and torture endured by anti-colonialist fighters – this line of praxis through filmmaking would continue in her 1972 feature Sambizanga: an exhilarating depiction of Angola’s fight for independence and self-determination. It’s also a film about Black womanhood, with acclaimed Black Feminist theorist bell hooks noting that Black women in the film are depicted so differently from what she had seen before: bonded, haunted and embodied in their grief.
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The BFI’s A Poet with a Camera: The Cinema of Sarah Maldoror season spotlights her legacy championed by Maldoror’s daughter, Annouchka de Andrade, who has spent the last few years programming and aiding retrospectives of her mother’s work across Europe and America. Recognising their mother’s landmark role as one of the first Black women directors, Annouchka and her sister, Henda Ducados sought to preserve her legacy amid the invisibility that she would face later in life – a common fate for Black women artists who often find themselves erased from an industry that benefits from their creativity and risk-taking. Maldoror’s daughters were confronted with a challenge: how does one share the work of a beloved family member whilst safeguarding the archive and her memory? Their answer was in the establishment of The Association of Friends of Sarah Maldoror in 2018.
Speaking to me over video chat, Annouchka relays the journey she and her sister have taken with their work. “Over the last 15 to 20 years of her life, nobody wanted to work with her or present any of her work, so I had to produce her two last movies,” she recalls. “It was only after her death that people began paying attention again. Movements like #MeToo, and more specifically #BlackLivesMatter emerged and drew people’s attention to Black filmmakers they did not know.”
Two years after The Association of Friends of Sarah Maldoror was founded, she died in 2020 from complications of COVID-19. Sarah Maldoror passed away the same year George Floyd was murdered. It was in that year that protests about Black subjugation rose globally, and questions began finding their way to the surface regarding media depictions of Blackness.
Last month, I saw an archive film collection titled The Archive Reimagined: Pan-African Histories and the Moving Image at the Barbican for their Project a Black Planet exhibition, which has also recently screened Maldoror’s films. The collection sought to answer the question of what happens to the archive when we forget that it exists. Do the filmmakers and radical figures within still find importance when their politics are no longer commercially viable? It’s clear that within our current landscape, one that decries anything progressive or Black as “woke” – a word borrowed from the same Black radical tradition Maldoror was working within – today’s actors, musicians, filmmakers, and archivists are fighting a similar battle. Despite promises to do better, uplift Black voices and talent and stories, we find fewer Black people and Black women in particular, leading TV shows and mainstream films. The cultural output of Blackness walks a tightrope of acceptance through consumption, or neglect through brutality.
Should we take advantage of the consumption? If so, how? For Annouchka, it was clear that the 2020 wave of acknowledgement was fleeting. Refusing to mince words, she states, “Everyone was so excited to discover a Black woman filmmaker. It was clear that something had changed, and so we had to jump on before it was too late.” This wave led to the restoration of Sambizanga with the aid of Martin Scorsese, the World Cinema Project, and Cineteca di Bologna. It was important for Annouchka that her mother’s work was not just tied to one film, given that her filmography includes 46 entries. “People need to understand how vast and rich her work was, and that they do not ignore the rest,” she explains. To ensure this, the titles in the season include a showcase of three of Maldoror’s short films – And the Dogs Kept Silent (1978), The Mask of Words (1987) and Slave’s Route: Glimpses of Memory (2003) – a blend of Maldoror’s passion for poetry and theatre through her reimagining of the work of the prolific poet, playwright, and essayist Aimé Césaire.
Maldoror was not only a filmmaker. Poetry and theatre, Annouchka explains, was the lifeblood of her mother. “She built her life around poetry, and I believe it was her main skill. Her identity was poetry because, for her, poetry was politics. I’m trying to refocus on that, and let people know that there is so much about her they’ve yet to discover. I want them to reconsider what they know about her.”
Both Maldoror’s daughters have continued to pass on their mother’s beliefs and brought new life into her legacy, allowing audiences to meet the woman they grew up with. Through screenings of the short documentary tribute Sarah Maldoror ou la nostalgie de l’utopie (1999), filmed Q&As, and a live reading by Annouchka of her mother’s 1959 interview The Queen of the Blacks Speaks to You about Whites, we witness a daughter’s re-examination of her relationship with memory in real time. Speaking of her mother with palpable admiration, Annouchka explains, “There were some things we didn’t know about her childhood. As she got older, I promised we would restore her work. I couldn’t answer definitively since the negatives of Sambizanga weren’t available to us at the time, but I tried my best to keep her vision alive. She gave us her blessing. We must be faithful to it.”
And faithful they have been. Their ongoing efforts to inspire younger audiences in an age of irony and division are indeed revolutionary. Sarah Maldoror is not a name I remember hearing when first entering film spaces as a teenager, but it’s one that I’ve found has stuck with me as I’ve gotten older. Her work as a poetic filmmaker asks us to pay attention to horrors but also to beauty. Our world must change but we cannot lose ourselves whilst doing so. We can draw inspiration from her work for our own creative outputs to foster her belief of a world free and fair to Black people and Black women. Though it may seem a small victory, from our conversation it’s clear that what we can learn from Sarah Maldoror as a person, is to persist against injustice, no matter its size.
A Poet with a Camera: The Cinema of Sarah Maldoror takes place at the BFI Southbank from the 2nd of September until the 3rd of October.
