Sarah Maldoror, A Life of Poetry and Struggles

A Film Program curated by  François Piron

Sarah Maldoror was a filmmaker whose work remains linked to the fight for independence in several African nations in the 1960s and 1970s, to which she dedicated many of her films. Born in the southern French city of Condom in 1929, she made her first appearance in the Parisian scene in the mid-1950s, already bearing her chosen name of Maldoror, the evil hero of the Chants of Comte de Lautréamont, rediscovered by the Surrealists and quoted by Aimé Césaire in his Discours sur le colonialisme (1950) as "the iron man forged by capitalist society.”

A student at the Sorbonne university, Sarah Maldoror founded Les Griots, the first theatre company of black actresses and actors in France, that will be become nationally famous for staging the play The Blacks by Jean Genet. Yet Maldoror was already elsewhere: in Africa with her companion Mário Pinto de Andrade, in Moscow to study cinema, then in Algiers, Martinique, Saint-Denis...

This program is part of  Spring Seminar 2025 Politics of Curatorship.

Session #3 - A Caribbean literary Heritage

9 Mai / Auditório Ilídio Pinho / 18:30

Aimé Césaire, Un Homme Une Terre
by Sarah Maldoror 
Martinica, 1976, 57'

Alternating interview sequences, shots of Martinique landscapes and scenes from Aimé Césaire’ play La Tragédie du roi Christophe [The Tragedy of King Christophe](1963), Sarah Maldoror paints a portrait of her friend Césaire, poet, politician and founder of the Négritude movement.
 

René Depestre, Poète Haïtien
by Sarah Maldoror 
France, 1981, 5'

Short documentary about René Depestre, poet and former communist activist, one of the most important figures in Haitian literature.

Toto Bissainthe
by Sarah Maldoror 
France, 1984, 4'

Portrait of the Haitian singer and friend of Sarah Maldoror, Toto Bissainthe, at one of her concerts.

Léon G. Damas
by Sarah Maldoror 
France, Guiana Francesa 1994, 25'

Portrait of Guyanese poet and politician Léon-Gontran Damas, as he drifts between landscapes and rivers, from Cayenne to Paris. His peers (Césaire, Senghor) testify to the poetic force of one of the founders of Négritude. But when Sarah Maldoror asks young girls about the Guyanese poets they know, their lack of knowledge indicates the violence of the colonial imaginary.