Welcome back to Black Life,
Thank you to all who attended Circling the Archive. Thank you again to Tayler Montague and Dwayne LeBlanc for sharing their wonderful films with us and allowing us to dream about stories, especially the kind that evoke feelings long after the screening ends. It was a really sweet afternoon and we’ll be sharing the conversation between Dwayne and ruth gebreyesus in the coming weeks.
We’re excited to return to your inbox with new events this summer where we hope to host you and continue our ongoing exploration of Black Life. First up is a screening on the afternoon of Sunday June 25 of Saint Omer, Alice Diop’s 2022 film starring Kayije Kagame and Guslagie Malanda. Diop’s first venture into narrative after more than a decade of documentary filmmaking, Saint Omer follows a young novelist, Rama (Kagame), who is observing the trial of Laurence Coly (Malanda), a woman accused of murdering her fifteen-month-old child in northern France. Based on a real-life 2016 trial in the French town the film borrows its title from, Diop’s haunting retelling is nuanced and charged with provocations about motherhood, immigration, and abandonment.
The critically lauded film’s themes reminded me of other complicated stories of motherhood including Toni Morrison’s Beloved. As fertile a mythology that motherhood is, it does seem to lose its multidimensionality in contemporary popular culture. Its less appealing and nuanced characteristics lose out to what we’ve deemed its most morally virtuous feature: selflessness. I hope you’re able to join us for this screening and its offer of a different sort of mother myth.
Black Life Recommends: Ousmane Sembène’s Mandabi
Mandabi
dir. Ousmane Sembène
Senegal, 1968
Saturday, July 15
4:30pm (91 mins)
featuring Mamadou Guye, Ynousse N’Diaye, Issa Niang, Serigne N’Diayes,
Ousmane Sembène’s second feature is a folk comedy set in contemporary Dakar. Ibrahima Dieng (Mamadou Guye) is a middle-aged Muslim man with two wives and seven children. One day he receives a money order from his nephew in Paris, with specific instructions for the division and use of the funds. However, news of the money order spreads quickly through the neighborhood, and soon Ibrahima’s home is filled with interested parties. Before he can collect the cash, Ibrahima is forced to wade through many layers of bureaucratic red tape. “Sembène’s approach is spare, laconic, slightly ironic, and never patronizing” (Roger Greenspun, New York Times). Mandabi is Sembène’s first film shot in Wolof, the mother tongue of the majority of Senegalese. This choice encouraged other African filmmakers to work with local vernacular languages as distinct from French or other languages brought to Africa by former colonial rulers. The film received the International Critics’ Prize at the Venice Film Festival.
—Susan Oxtoby
As always, we reserve a set amount of free tickets that we joyfully offer to Black Life’s extended community of Black and brown filmmakers, artists, creators, and curious viewers. We encourage you to send a request for a ticket with your full name to blackblacklifelife@gmail.com by June 23rd.
BLACK LIFE MIXTAPE #22 - Mother!
I. Toni Morrison, a formidable woman of letters
II. Bobrisky is your mummy
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III. Stevie Wonder - As