Le Labo Lab and Cinemawon are joining forces for the third year in a row and are organizing this February 15th an evening dedicated to Black cinema in the 70s. We will be showing three short films of Black directors from all over the world. We are happy to rely on the support of Antoine Quiet (son of director Joseph Akouissone) and Wally Fall from Cinemawon.
Three short documentaries to document the artistic production of Black artists in the 70s and that raise important questions: slavery, memory, the past, racial identity, solitude, daily life …
This is not just a program on Blackness, but it also shed light on ongoing struggles.
Discover the following films:
Josepha (Joseph Akouissonne, 1975)
Genre: Documentary
Duration : 12min30
Country of production: France, Central African Republic
A short 16mm film in color about the condition of women of color in Europe. Here, the famous black beautician and hairdresser of Paris, Josepha. Josepha talks about her job, her problems, and explains the action she takes in terms of aesthetics to disalienate her clients of color, who are too often tempted to deny their blackness and imitate the Europeans.
The soul in the eye (Zozimo Bulbul, 1973)
Genre: Experimental – performative
Duration: 11min
Country of production: Brazil
Inaugural work of Afro-Brazilian cinema that uses the body as a reminiscence to tell the story of slave trade and slavery of black people until their liberation.
My Neighbors (Med Hondo, 1973)
Genre: Documentary
Duration: 37min
Country of production: Mauritania, France
African expatriate workers talk about daily life and racism in the employment and housing markets of Paris in the 1970s. This short film reveals the possibilities for cinema to speak about the postcolonial state of the world.
Joseph Akouissone
Joseph Akouissone was born in 1943 in Bangassou. He completed his primary and secondary education at the Technical High School of Bangui. In 1965, he left for France to prepare his diploma in mechanics and to train as an engineer. He decides to not pursue this path, because he is passionate about ethnology in its cinematographic approach. Joseph Akouissone’s films truly reflect his concern to bring to the screen subjects related to his condition as an African and prove how much his life has not led to an erasure of his cultural identity for the benefit of Europe but has caused, on the contrary, an increased sensitivity to his culture of origin.
Zózimo Bulbul
Zózimo Bulbul was a Brazilian actor, filmmaker and activist. Bulbul was a prominent advocate of Afro-Brazilian culture within Brazilian cinema and society in general. Bulbul co-founded and organized the Encontro de Cinema Negro Brasil, África & Américas, which presents films featuring African and Afro-Brazilian actors, directors and themes.
Med Hondo
Federico Rossin (film historian, independent programmer) writes about Med Hondo that he was a paradoxical filmmaker and man: bound by his political faith and his history as an activist in the French Communist Party, but at the same time a very experimental artist in his cinematographic research, one could say a Franco-Mauritanian Maïakovski. His films are wild, unclassifiable, free objects: mixing direct cinema, cine-tract, music video, agitprop animation, that’s what « Mes voisins » is made of. His cinema is a panorama of causes of immigration and the situation of immigrants, in the explosive form of a mixture of documents captured on the spot and sketches, songs and animated drawings.