Carnival is an event and a festivity where the limits can be transgressed in a context brimming with music, sensations and textures. In this film, it is also a starting point for an approach on the history of black culture and colonialism, with concepts of identity and blackness taking center stage.
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.
In this documentary, Sarah Maldoror interviews Louis Aragon, a poet and a key figure in French surrealism. At the same time, she questions how the surrealist movement – in the periods between and post-war – faced the racial issue, the “other” and the affirmation of other identities.
A journey from the Parisian outskirts to the Scala operatic theater in Milan. A film that takes a rap by Archie Shepp (American jazz saxophonist and playwright) to build a melodious reflection on social inclusion in the suburbs of Paris.
Metal fruit bowls and paintings representing the banana. Colombian artist Ana Mercedes Hoyos talks about her influences in a documentary that does not forget issues such as slavery and Afro-Caribbean cultures.
A portrait of Haitian singer Toto Bissainthe, whose musical journey is marked by her desire todisseminate creole singing.
After the death of the poet and activist Aimé Césaire, friend and subject of many of her films, Sarah Maldoror revisits points of the globe where he traveled to. The film includes interviews with family members and excerpts from her films with and about the poet.
Documentary with the poets Édouard Glissant and Aimé Césaire, which also includes interviews with the writer Roland Suvélor and the politician Madeleine de Grandmaison. Greg Germain, actor and director, reads poems.
Sarah Maldoror travels to Réunion, an island in the Indian Ocean that is also a region of France. On the island, she visits the Village Titan, in the city of Le Port, a cultural center where you can learn singing, music, painting, dancing, circus, as well as visual and performing arts.
1983 in Mexico. Russian painter Vlady Kibalchich Rusakov, a refugee in the country, finishes an 8-year long work: painting the frescoes in the chapel of San Felipe Neri, which was transformed into the Miguel Lerdo Library by the Mexican State.
The French national library presents itself, nevertheless, as a library of the whole world, due to its accumulated literary wealth. Piece about the Tunis-Paris Exhibition: Espaces et temps privilégiés — La production intellectuelle tunisienne d’expression française, in 1986.
Interview with Algerian author Assia Djebar about her novel Ombre Sultane. Djebar discusses the role of women in the Arab and Muslim world, and her desire for Western or European readers to see themselves in the book’s protagonists.
The director returns to the figure of Aimé Césaire more than ten years after Aimé Césaire — Un homme, une terre. The occasion is a tribute paid to the surrealist poet and activist of the black movement in Miami. In an interview, he recalls his life’s trajectory.
A look at the stylist Emanuel Ungaro. For him, it all started with the touch, with the sensual rapport that is established with the fabrics of his clothes. For him, fashion is sensuality.
After an interview whose theme is Senegalese immigrants in France, a piece by Sarah Maldoror appears. This is about the role of African women in social organization, founded on ideals of community solidarity.
Interview with women of different nationalities who are “public” writers. They link French administrative bodies to people who cannot speak and/or write French.
Presentation and representation of The Hostage, a play by French author Paul Claudel at the Théâtre de la Comédie.
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.