Program

Fogo, Island of Fire

Sarah Maldoror 1979 France, Cape Verde color 35min DCP
date time venue guests rating
10/19 18:50 Spot Huasan A One G
10/22 14:30 Spot Huasan A One G
Filmed in newly independent Cape Verde, Sarah Maldoror’s documentary captures the rhythms of everyday life on Fogo Island with rare intimacy and dignity. Rejecting exoticism, it celebrates collective labour, cultural resilience, and the enduring spirit of decolonization through an attentive, deeply human gaze.

Director

Sarah Maldoror

Sarah Maldoror (1929-2020), a pioneering filmmaker, secured a place in the histories of women’s cinema and African cinema with the anti-colonial classic *Sambizanga*. The film earned her titles “Mother of African Cinema” and “revolutionary auteur”. Yet these labels are never quite sufficient. With over forty films to her name, her body of work closely accompanies the major intellectual and political movements of the 20th century—Négritude, Pan-Africanism, feminism, and communism—tirelessly documenting the people’s struggle for liberation. Born in France to a Guadeloupean father and a French mother, she began her career as a theater-maker, co-founding a theater company, *Les Griots*—the first theatrical troupe in France composed entirely of Black actors in the 1950s, before studying filmmaking in Moscow. She later joined Africa's anti-colonial struggles and became a key figure in pan-African cinema. Despite being deeply committed to the liberation movements in Africa with her companion, the MPLA poet and founder, Mário Pinto de Andrade, her work eschewed propaganda and heroic spectacle, locating revolution in labor, song, neighborhood solidarity, women’s participation, cultural continuity, and everyday lives. Throughout her life, she continually crosses identities, borders, and cinematic forms, using cinema as a tool of pursuing freedom and resistance. Rooted in Black consciousness yet spanning across Africa, Europe, and the Black diaspora, she forged a singular cinematic language. Perhaps no words better capture her life's work than her mentor Aimé Césaire dedicated to her: "To Sarah Maldoror, who, camera in hand, fights oppression, alienation, and flies in the face of human bullshit."

Sarah Maldoror

Cinematographer Pierre Bouchacourt, Sana Na N'Hada
 

Editor Salvatore Burgos
 

Music José Pereira Cardozo

The Friends of Sarah Maldoror and Mario de Andrade Association
andradeandmaldororarchives@gmail.com