THE FIRST TIME OF BRAZILIAN CINEMA

Directed by Denise Godinho Costa, Bruno Graziano, Hugo Moura

2013 / 45min / 35mm

-to-DCP. In Wolof with English subtitles.) “[A THOUSAND SUNS is a] documentary about Magaye Niang, the lead actor of TOUKI-BOUKI, the 1972 classic made by the director’s legendary filmmaker uncle Djibril Diop Mambéty. Shot in Dakar and Alaska, MILLE SOLEILS mystifies as it searches for an origin, its lineage and its transcendent deviations, flouting its own premise as fantasy merges with reality: the sad-eyed cattle herder who embodied the seminal role in TOUKI-BOUKI forty years ago is now filled with longing for the vanished past and a future that was never meant to be.” –Andréa Picard, VIENNALE Onyeka Igwe A SO-CALLED ARCHIVE (2020, 20 min, DCP) “A SO-CALLED ARCHIVE interrogates the decomposing repositories of Empire with a forensic lens. Blending footage shot over the past year in two separate colonial archive buildings – one in Lagos, Nigeria, and the other in Bristol, United Kingdom – this double portrait considers the ‘sonic shadows’ that colonial images continue to generate, despite the disintegration of their memory and their materials.” –Mason Leaver-Yap, LUX Ulysses Jenkins MASS OF IMAGES (1978, 4 min, DCP) “MASS OF IMAGES engages elements of both performance and video art to address myriad racial stereotypes of African Americans in the media. Using blurred black-and-white film accompanied by a low humming sound, Jenkins employed exaggerated staging to mirror the ridiculousness and prevalence of stereotypical images.” –HAMMER MUSEUM Maxime Jean-Baptiste NOU VOIX (2018, 14 min, DCP. In French with English subtitles.) “NOU VOIX is an autobiographical video based on my father’s participation as a Guyanese extra in the French film JEAN GALMOT AVENTURIER (1990). By replaying part of the film, my father and I try to reveal voices that were covered up by the staging of the film.” –Maxime Jean-Baptiste The Otolith Group MASCON: A MASSIVE CONCENTRATION OF BLACK EXPERIENTIAL ENERGY (2024, 36 min, DCP) “Think of MASCON: A MASSIVE CONCENTRATION OF BLACK EXPERIENTIAL ENERGY as an audiovisual investigation into the gestures, geometries, grammars and geographies that compose the forms and the forces of the films of Ousmane Sembene and Djibril Diop Mambety from 1963 to 2004. As an audiovisual mosaic of still moving images and sounds that summons the borderless imagination of the cine-Sahel. As digital morphologies that assail the imagination with the expansive deformation, compacted compression and amassed concentration that Stephen Henderson calls ‘Mascon’ or ‘a massive concentration of black experiential energy’.” –Otolith Group