Synopsis
With a jazz soundtrack from the Art Ensemble of Chicago, this film denounces the crimes committed by the Portuguese in Angola. Here, we see the torture of a prisoner that results from the colonizer’s ignorance. A song whose meaning is “White Death”, Monangambéee, is a rallying cry against the colonial abuses in Angola.
A word from Tënk
In 1969, Sarah Maldoror is 40 years old. After founding the theatre company Les Griots in 1956 in Paris, she went to study cinema in Moscow in 1961. With her theatrical and literary background, and being very close to many artists involved in African decolonial struggles, she shot her first film Monangambéee in Algiers. Partner of the Angolan militant and politician Mário Pinto de Andrade, Maldoror made this film that portrays in both symbolic and frontal ways the torture by the Portuguese army of an Angolan resistance fighter.
While the direction does not sacrifice poetry for the struggle, the images remain imbued with an expressive ferocity that mobilizes a healthy revolt. Maldoror's cinema thus becomes both a witness to historically situated liberation movements and a bearer of a broader discourse embracing fundamentally egalitarian values and advocating for the abolition of servitudes. Monangambéee was the rallying cry used by activists to gather villages during the anti-colonial liberation struggle in Angola. Maldoror's film acts like this cry, rallying under the poetic force of the images a contemporary desire for liberation.
Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk's Artistic Director
