With an opening scheduled for April 28, the exhibition curated by François Piron and Annouchka de Andrade will be on display at the Iron Palace, after visiting the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris, and Torreão Nascente da Cordoaria Nacional, in Lisbon.
The exhibition celebrates and recognizes an icon who was a pioneer in presenting the struggle of the Angolan people for independence on the international stage, using cinema as a weapon, according to a statement from the organization of the event.
The proposal focuses on "walking through a landscape – in fact, here, a landscape from films – mixing animated images, documents, correspondence, photographs and poetry".
A space will be devoted to the connection that the filmmaker established with Angola through the testimony of two emblematic personalities, the writer Luandino Vieira and, above all, the intellectual and politician Mário Pinto de Andrade, her lifelong companion, says the note.
On the sidelines of the exhibition, there will be 'master classes', a round table and film screenings, as well as guided tours in the month of May.
With more than 45 films, of various genres, and many other projects that he did not complete, none "completely obeys the laws of the cinematographic genre – documentary, fiction, portrait, landscape, among others – but all of them are similar in the care they show in putting poetry ahead of speech, fighting prejudice and racism and never sacrificing people's everyday experience in favor of ideas", emphasize the organizers.
The initiative is by the Association of Friends of Sarah Maldoror & Mário de Andrade, in partnership with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the French Embassy, the BAI Foundation and BAI Academy and the Camões-Centro Cultural Português.
Sarah Maldoror was born Sarah Ducados in 1929, in southwest France, the daughter of a French father from Guadeloupe and a French mother, and adopted the name Maldoror in allusion to the malevolent hero of Cantos de Maldoror (1868) by the Count of Lautréamont.
In the 1950s, in Paris, he co-founded the first black theater company in France: 'Les Griots' and it was also in the French capital that he met the poet and political activist Mário Pinto de Andrade, who would become his companion and will take her to Guinea-Conakry, where her desire to work with cinema arises, as well as the opportunity to study cinema in Moscow.
The complicity with Mário Pinto de Andrade, who became leader of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), and Amílcar Cabral, led Sarah to dedicate her first feature film to the guerrillas in Guinea-Bissau.
One of his greatest achievements is the launch of "Sambizanga" in 1972, which tells the rise of awareness against the colonial yoke among the people of Angola, through the journey of Maria, a woman looking for her husband, detained in Portuguese prisons.
