Manthia Diawara’s new film Negritude (2015) is not an attempt to neatly summarize Négritude, arguably one of the most important intellectual movements of the 20th century, but an effort to face and understand the contradictions of History. His interlocutors are poet and freedom fighter Léopold Senghor who together with Aimé Césaire is considered a founder of Négritude thinking and who became the first president of independent Senegal in 1960; and Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka who in 1986 was the first African to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
English and French with German subtitles.
The screening is followed by a talk with Manthia Diawara, moderated by Tobias Hering.
Documents from the South: An encounter between documenta 14 and Kassel Dokfest
documenta 14 is hosting the program Documents from the South as part of the Kassel Dokfest. On November 18 and 19, Angela Melitopoulos and Manthia Diawara will each present two program sessions, including screenings of their own films as well as works by other filmmakers. In the films and in conversations following the screenings, the artists discuss what documents from the South could look like and which stories they tell.
Documents from the South takes its cue from the title of the magazine South as a State of Mind, which is published during the years of work preceding the exhibition of documenta 14 and helps define and frame its concerns and aims. “South” is no longer understood as a geographical orientation, but refers to a culturally and historically produced location charged with psychological and political meaning.
Two documenta 14 artists discuss these concerns in relation to their own work with the Dokfest audience: Angela Melitopoulos, in whose films and video installations different phases, ruptures, and mobilities between Germany and Greece play an important role; and filmmaker and writer Manthia Diawara whose films and books have shaped and expressed the critical self-assertion of the African diaspora since the early 1990s.
