Three short films and Q&A with director Nora Philippe.
View the trailers for Like Dolls, I'll Rise and Le bleu blanc rouge de mes cheveux; and the director's interview for Les Indes Galantes.
Part of the film series "Blackness in French and Francophone Film" organized by the Columbia Maison Française and co-sponsored by the School of the Arts.
Like Dolls I'll Rise is a film by Nora Philippe that breathes life into rag dolls made by anonymous Afro-American women in the 19th and early 20th centuries for their own children or for the white children they were looking after. Black, injured and forgotten, these magnificent dolls, collected by Debbie Neff, lend their expressive features to the women that a century of slavery, segregation and racism tried to silence. Far from being the mute witnesses of their suffering, dreams and courage, these objects haunted by so many stories become, for the length of this film, the intermediaries of a discourse of self-affirmation and liberation. From Sojourner Truth to Maya Angelou, Like Dolls I'll Rise is inhabited by the voices of these women, writers, poets, activists, who brought the history of black America, and that of the long-ignored women, out of the shadows. (Céline Guénot)
In Le bleu blanc rouge de mes cheveux (2016, 20 min.) Josza Anjembe protrays a teenager from Cameroon who is passionate about the history of France, the country where she was born and which she loves deeply. Having just brilliantly graduated from high school and getting closer to ago 18, Seyna aspires only to one thing: obtaining French citizenship. But her father Amidou is fiercely opposed to the project.
In Les Indes Galantes (The Amorous Indies) (2017, 6 min.), Clément Cogitore created and filmed a performance of "krumping" to Les Indes Galantes, music that was composed for opera-ballet by Jean-Philippe Rameau in 1735. Krumping is an urban dance form born in black neighborhoods in Los Angeles after the 1995 riots. The performance was conceived by the most famous hip hop choregraphers in France and Belgium, Dembele, Caruge and Rachiki, and filmed on the stage of Opéra Bastille stage, both a historic symbol of revolution and a contemporary symbol of elite culture.
Columbia University co-sponsors of Blackness in French and Francophone Film: Maison Française; School of the Arts; Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality; Institute for African Studies; Columbia Global Centers/Paris; European Institute; and Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities
Film series presented with support from the Paul LeClerc Centennial Fund, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, la Scam, and the Knapp Family Foundation.