In 2021, Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation partnered with Cineteca di Bologna to launch a new 4K restoration of Sambizanga, the second feature film directed by the filmmaker and political activist Sarah Maldoror, at Il Cinema Ritrovato.
Since then, prints of Sambizanga and Maldoror’s many later works have been some of the most in-demand properties on the repertory scene, with retrospectives at various institutions from MoMA to Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. And next up on the trail is London, where, next week, the British Film Institute will launch its own large-scale survey of Maldoror’s sprawling career.
Titled A Poet With A Camera: The Cinema of Sarah Maldoror, the BFI’s season will screen more than 40 films made with the involvement of Maldoror throughout her decades-long career. The series launches on September 2 with the Scorsese-backed Sambizanga restoration.
Directed by Maldoror from a screenplay she co-wrote with her husband, Mário Pinto de Andrade, a prominent leader of the Angolan independence movement, the film is set in 1961, at the start of the Angolan War of Independence from Portugal. The story follows the young mother Maria as she searches for her husband, Domingos, who has been captured by the Portuguese colonial police force and thrown in jail. Maria travels on foot, with their baby on her back, trying to free Domingos and keep her family together.
The importance of the film in the history of global cinema cannot be overstated. It is likely the first feature to have been directed by a woman in Sub-Saharan Africa. (Maldoror’s first film, Guns for Banta (1970), was confiscated by Algerian government officials, who had provided funding, before it could be screened). Maldoror began the restoration process in 2017 with Scorsese but died in April 2020 from complications related to COVID-19. The restoration was completed by Maldoror’s daughter, Annouchka de Andrade, who, over almost the last decade, has slowly tracked down, collected, and restored dozens of her mother’s film works.
“It has been a long journey,” de Andrade tells Deadline over Zoom from her home in Paris, with a smile.
Other works set to screen at the BFI include several of Maldoror’s non-fiction films, like Aimé Césaire, A Man, A Land, a documentary portrait of the Martinican author Aimé Césaire. Space has also been carved out to screen some of the more well-known titles that Maldoror helped produce but wasn’t correctly credited for at the time; among them is Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers.
“She was responsible for scene continuity, which is very important. She also worked on the editing and was the head of costumes,” de Andrade says of her mother’s work on Algiers.
“Ultimately, she was a filmmaker by necessity; that was not her first choice. For her, cinema was just the best way to express herself and the best technology at the time to spread ideas. It was her best contribution to the struggle for liberation.”
Below, de Andrade speaks with us in great detail about the lengthy struggle she has undertaken to preserve her mother’s legacy, the protracted battle she and Scorsese had with rights holders in France to restore Sambizanga, and her plans for the future.
De Andrade tells us that a Sarah Maldoror archive will be established this year at a university in the United States, a documentary on the filmmaker is currently in the works, and there are discussions about producing a work from one of Maldoror’s unproduced screenplays.
A Poet With A Camera: The Cinema of Sarah Maldoror is at BFI Southbank from 2 – 30 September
DEADLINE: Annouchka, how did this retrospective at the BFI come about?
ANNOUCHKA DE ANDRADE: I’m an admirer of the BFI’s work, and I’ve wanted to do something with them since I visited in 2021 for the London Film Festival screening of the Sambizanga restoration. It felt like a good place to host a retrospective when we had finished restoring more of Sarah’s films. I wrote to the BFI, but I found it difficult to find the correct people to speak with. Thankfully, some friends connected me, and the BFI was keen. And it all came together well because we have now completed the restorations of many more of Sarah’s films. We can now present a whole programme, not just one film.
DEADLINE: So Martin Scorsese and Film Foundation did the first restoration of ‘Sambizanga’ in 2021?
DE ANDRADE: The film was produced by a French producer, Jacques Poitrenaud, who had sold his catalog to a guy called René Chateau, who decided he didn’t want to do anything with most of the films. He was only interested in Bruce Lee.
DEADLINE: How have you approached these restorations? I assume you weren’t around for all the original productions?
DE ANDRADE: It really depends on the film. As a child, I had no choice; Sarah had us on set, so we were on the Sambizanga set. As a teenager, I wasn’t at all interested in being involved. But as I got older, I became more involved, and I wanted to be part of Sarah’s work. That’s when I began to read poetry, starting in 1977, in her films. And then I became her secretary and, finally, her producer. So we were part of many of her films.
DEADLINE: And where have all of the films been housed? In Paris?
DE ANDRADE: Honestly, each film has its own story. The films she shot on 16 and 35mm are in the laboratory, so we have them, and we know where most of them are. Two are lost because, when it came to shooting digitally, Sarah would often send the films to festivals to be mastered, and the footage would end up lost, or they’d never return it. In 2018, while Sarah was still alive, I told her that I thought it would be a good idea to gather all the material, and that’s when I started. It has been a very difficult and long journey. I actually found a new film just two weeks ago. It’s a very short one. It is on VHS, and I will be digitizing it. In four years, we have restored 22 movies, which is quite a good number.
DE ANDRADE: Well, in mastering her films. It’s a nice process because I am still discovering things about her work. I have been working on her archives. I had to organize all her papers, and that was amazing because I realized she had made 46 movies. Five are lost, but she had written 60 film projects. Some had been worked through in notes. And there were eight versions of the same screenplay in her papers. She had been working on the project for over 10 years. It is a really big and important movie.
DEADLINE: Wow, can you say anything more about the film?
DE ANDRADE: It’s a film about a revolutionary from the West Indies who has been sent to France to fight during the war. After the French Revolution, slavery was abolished, so he decides to return to Guadeloupe as a free person. Some years later, Bonaparte decides to bring back slavery for economic reasons, and this revolutionary, Delgres, launches an army, and they refuse to return to slavery. They say they’d prefer to die before returning to bondage. Obviously, the French army is much bigger and stronger, so they decide to kill themselves. The screenplay is a historical movie about this story. It was a very big and expensive project, with battles and everything. Sarah changed the screenplay so many times because she was trying to reduce the production costs. She tried to find funding in France, the West Indies, South Africa, and the U.S., with no luck. We will maybe do something with this screenplay; we aren’t sure exactly what, but that will be in the future.
DEADLINE: Hearing you talk about Sarah’s papers is so interesting. Do you have any plans to make this material public for researchers?
DE ANDRADE: Yes, of course. All the organized papers were here in Paris at my place. And I’d often have researchers and filmmakers come to view them and ask questions. We have now decided to preserve this material because it’s a lot of documents: all the screenplays, correspondence, photographs, and press. We have decided to deposit it in a public space. It will be at an American university. I can’t say which one now because they want to announce it officially. But by the end of the year, it will be public.
DEADLINE: Since the 2021 restoration, there has been so much interest in Sarah’s work, and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down. What is your end goal for her work?
DE ANDRADE: I have accepted that there is my mum, and I will always keep her close, and there is the public woman, Sarah Maldoror. I will continue my work of retrieving her rights, restoring her films, and locating the lost projects. That is the first and most important thing. I am now working on a book that will tell her story. It will explore her life through an analysis of the films and what was happening in her life at the time of their making. I give my point of view as her child, but also as her assistant. I’m trying to complete it for next year. I’m also working on a documentary. And then the university archive will launch, and I will be done.
There are so many articles online about Sarah, and so much of the information is incorrect. That’s why I started working on the book. The idea is to position her in the history of cinema. But also in the context of the struggles she faced, because it’s very important to understand where she’s coming from. Many young filmmakers talk about how she was the first Black woman to direct a film in Africa. But years before, in 1956, she also created the first Black film company. We have to understand how much she opened the doors for us to be free. I want to clarify that, and then I think my job will be done.
DEADLINE: Yeah, it is quite funny how context is often removed in a filmmaker’s afterlife. In Sarah’s case, I often feel this contemporary reconfiguration of her life and work rarely accounts for how deeply she was involved in various liberation movements across Africa. Does the restored work screen in Africa? How do you see her connection with the continent now? The filmmaking world there now is so different.
DE ANDRADE: We have a screening happening right now in Addis Ababa. And whenever I get screening requests from Africa, we send the movie. My sister and I presented the restored copy of Sambizanga in Angola, and we invited the two surviving actors from the movie, which was really nice. I would like to present the movie at FESPACO, but they’ve never invited Sarah.
DE ANDRADE: Yes, I know. Even during her lifetime, they didn’t want to invite her. She was never invited as a member of the jury. Her movies were on the side, not in the official selection. But I hope there will be an opportunity to present her movie. I have also worked with the French Institute on a deal to present the film at all French Institutes across Africa. They will screen it for free, which is very important to us.
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