UK Premiere: Nationalité: Immigré + Ballade aux Sources

"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.

Screening with Ballade aux sources, Med Hondo’s first film and his least known (1965, Mauritania) an adventure of an African emigrant on his native land made shortly after the independence of North Africa, Ballade aux sources. Out of circulation for decades (it is not clear whether it was ever screened theatrically), it was recently found in the garage of his codirector, French journalist, photographer and archaeologist Bernard Nantet.

Presented by co-curator Abiba Coulibaly, as part of Other Ways of Seeing, with support from BFI Awarding Funds from National Lottery.

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