The Rebel's Cinema - Frantz Fanon on Screen

Monangambeee (Sarah Maldoror, 1969, Algeria/Angola, 17m)

The masterful directorial debut of Sarah Maldoror, Monangambeee was filmed in 1969 in Algeria, which had won its liberation from France just seven years before, though it takes place in Angola, which was still six years away from independence. An Angolan woman visits her husband in prison, and wants to give him a “completo”-which means “three-course meal” in Angola, and “three-piece suit” in Portugal. In jagged black and white, with a clattering free-jazz score by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Monangambeee depicts the misunderstandings and violence that ensue when the guards assume that the prisoner is planning an escape and proceed to torture him. 

Followed by:

The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting (Assia Djebar, 1982, Algeria, 60m)

In the elegiac The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting, Algerian novelist Assia Djebar pairs French colonial newsreels shot in Algeria with a haunting, counterposed soundtrack, excavating and recovering a vivid, resilient history of indigenous Algerian ceremonies from the oppressor’s gaze. Made by women who were equal parts revolutionaries and artists, Monangambeee and The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting dramatize, in astutely Fanonian fashion, language as a terrain of radical struggle—as rife with possibility for self-negation as for solidarity.