In the wake of the #EndSARS one year anniversary, join us for a rooftop screening at Hfactor featuring films by militant filmmakers Sarah Maldoror, Ousmane Sembene and Gadalla Gubara. All three explore the ongoing carcerality of Black African life in colonial and “postcolonial” times, as well as histories of rebellion and protest. Theirs is a sustained engagement with entangled material holds and visual enclosures, and the need to liberate both bodies and imaginations.
RSVP required.
Full program
MONANGAMBEE, Sarah Maldoror, Angola, 1968
Sound. Black and white. 17mn.
A prisoner is tortured in colonial prison in Angola.
SAMBIZANGA, Sarah Maldoror, Angola, 1972
Sound. Color. 102 mn.
Maria (Elisa Andrade), wife of an anticolonial political prisoner Domingos Xavier, fights to have him liberated.
TAUW, Ousmane Sembene, Senegal, 1970
Sound. Color. 27 mn.
An unemployed young man looks for work in Dakar.
LES MISERABLES, Gadalla Gubara, 2007
Sound. Color. 112 mn.
A Sudanese adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel, in which Jaber (Gamal Hassan) is incarcerated for stealing medicine to save his niece.
About the filmmakers
Gadalla Gubara (1921 - 2008) was a prolific Sudanese filmmaker, trained as a cameraman at the British Colonial Film Unit, with a body of work comprising of more than 50 features, shorts, documentaries, home movies and adverts. At the independence of the country in 1956, he played a crucial role in the institutionalization of both a local Sudanese cinema through the state-funded Sudanese Film Unit and a panafrican continental cinema through the creation of the FESPACO festival held in Ouagadougou in 1969 and the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers FEPACI a year later. He continued to document postcolonial Sudan until the 1980s, when political repression made his work increasingly difficult. After the 1989 military coup, he was imprisoned alongside other persecuted intellectuals, and became blind while incarcerated. He shot his last film with the assistance of his daughter Sara, Les Misérables, adapted from a novel by Victor Hugo, before his death in 2008.
More about Gubara
visit the Studio Gad Archive
Sarah Maldoror (1929 - 2020), was a filmmaker of French and West Indies descent and fearless chronicler of Black continental and diasporic struggles for dignity and emancipation from colonial rule. She came to cinema through theater, founding with a collective of Black actors the Compagnie d’Art Dramatique des Griots in 1956. She later trained in film, through formal schooling and working on film sets. Her trajectory between Paris, Moscow and Algiers, testifies to the insurgent networks and cartographies of militant filmmakers of her generation, shaped by soviet cinema and anticolonial rebellions. Her expansive body of work – most of it scattered, unseen and damaged as is too often the fate of Black radical films – includes an extensive engagement with Angolan freedom fighters, in the short Monangambee, and the feature Sambizanga.
More about Maldoror
“Woman With a Weapon-Camera” by Yasmina Price, The New Inquiry, August 2020
“Sarah Maldoror (1928–2020), as remembered by her two daughters”, by Annouchka de Andrade, Henda Ducados, Another Gaze, April 2021
Ousmane Sembene (1923 - 2007) was a polymath Senegalese filmmaker, novelist, veteran of the Senegalese Tirailleurs corps, factory worker, dock worker, labor organizer and much more. As Maldoror and many other figures of this generation of militant filmmakers, he was trained in Moscow. While literature remained his true love, he saw in cinema a “night school” for the exploited masses of the African continent, and his films sometimes adapted his literary work. He tirelessly chronicled the multifaceted oppressions Black Africans faced, whether in the imperial metropoles or “postcolonial” Senegal. His films were a staunch critique of colonialism, monotheist religions, gendered oppression and an African bourgeoisie eager to replace colonial officials but unwilling to radically transform its relations to both former colonial powers and the larger Senegalese society.
More about Sembene
“Ousmane Sembene on Cinema as Activism”, excerpt from Sembene: The Making of African Cinema by Manthia Diawara and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, 1994
“Where to begin with Ousmane Sembene” by Chrystel Oloukoi, BFI, June 2021