Liberation Unfinished

In the cinema of decolonization women directors are under-represented and the gender balance is usually a peripheral issue at most. This program presents films by women who were involved in the anti-colonial revolutions of the 1960s and feature the role that women played in the liberation struggles while criticizing the revolution’s continuing gender and race differences. In the 1960s, during the liberation movement in Angola, Guadaloupian Sarah Maldoror Ende shot her short film, Monangambée, in Algeria. The central protagonist is the wife of an Angolan freedom fighter. In De cierta manera, Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez follows the narrow path of identification with the programs of revolutionary Cuba combined with simultaneous criticism of their relationship to the sexes and to ethnic groups. Employing the example of the conversion of a slum into a social housing project together with a difficult love story between a white middle-class woman and a black worker, Gómez contrasts this situation with the structure of the new Cuban society with its aspirations of freedom and equality. In order to meld contradictions of this nature into a form the film makes use of documentary methods, techniques from propaganda and narrative forms from feature films.

Film Program

Sarah Maldoror, Monangambée, 1969, 15 min
Sara Gómez, La isla tesoro, 1969, 9 min
Sara Gómez, De cierta manera, 1974, 79 min

Presented by Christian Kravagna.

Christian Kravagna is an art historian and curator and is also Professor for Postcolonial Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.