Nationalité immigré

15

"It is up to us, as African filmmakers who have a place to carve out for ourselves, to make films politically better than anyone else." Sidney Sokhona, Cahiers du Cinéma, 1978

Sidney Sokhona was a young Mauritanian living in Paris when he embarked on a film project to document a rent strike at the hostel where he and 300 other immigrants were housed in squalid conditions.

Born of necessity but in the most modest circumstances, with a borrowed camera and volunteer crew, the film that premiered five years later at the Cannes Film Festival had developed into a politically astute, formally dazzling hybrid of documentary and fiction in which Sokhona himself played the role of a young man clandestinely arriving in Paris in the trunk of a car to be confronted with the dead ends of a crippling bureaucracy, inadequate housing conditions and employment opportunities, overt racism, and the well-meaning but domineering efforts of the progressive Left. With Western capitalism, anti-blackness, and migration at its fore, the film’s politics is more than ever relevant to current public debates on inequalities.

This screening is in partnership with Tianna McIntosh as part of Mosaic Film Club. There will be an introduction before the film.

As part of the Cinema Rediscovered Touring Film Programme.

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