All about my mother: Annouchka de Andrade on Sarah Maldoror

• ‘A Poet with a Camera: The Cinema of Sarah Maldoror’ runs from September to 4 October at BFI Southbank

Sambizanga was made with a French producer, who later sold his catalogue to another producer, who decided not to do anything with the film. He kept the rights, and my mother didn’t have access to her own movie – at the time there was only the 35mm print. She couldn’t present it anywhere besides the US. In France, Europe and the rest of the world, the rights were kept for 40 years.

In 2017, Sarah received a letter from Martin Scorsese who, through his Film Foundation, said he would be delighted to collaborate on Sambizanga’s restoration. I had to answer and say that this wasn’t possible because we didn’t have access to the negative. I think the producer didn’t believe us when we said Scorsese was interested. I asked Cecilia Cenciarelli from the Cineteca di Bologna to ask Scorsese to send a personal letter to the producer. Then he said “Of course!” He also renewed the rights with us. Unfortunately, in the meantime my mother had died, so I continued and the restored film was available in 2021. I made a promise to her that I would do my best to make this film accessible again, and we did.

Sambizanga is not to be missed, but I think it’s also interesting to discover Sarah’s relationship with poetry. I’d suggest her films on Aimé Césaire [Aimé Césaire – un homme une terre, 1977; Aimé Césaire au bout du petit matin, 1977; Aimé Césaire, le masque des mots, 1987; Eia pour Césaire, 2009], and the one she made on [Léon-Gontran] Damas, the Guyanese poet who was one of the creators of the Négritude movement [Léon G. Damas, 1994]. Her film on the French poet Louis Aragon [Louis Aragon, un masque à Paris, 1980] is a really funny movie about surrealism. She was not focused only on Black history, Black dignity. I think poetry is something that defines her much more [than filmmaking]. The films that she made in Guinea-Bissau after the war, her Carnival Trilogy [Fogo, île de feu, 1979; Carnaval dans le Sahel, 1979; Bissau le carnaval, 1980], those are also really important.

Often people categorise Sarah as a militant filmmaker, but for me this is reducing her. Of course her first three movies were about liberation in Angola, but that was a question of urgency. There was a war going on in Africa that nobody was talking about. There were no images, just a few testimonies in newspapers. On screen they were talking only about the Vietnam War.

Sarah said that for her the camera is a weapon. But she was an artist. She was a poet. She had a very intense and deep relation not only with poetry, but with paintings. She loved painters. That’s how she made her last movie, Ana Mercedes Hoyos (2008), in Colombia. I was living there, and I invited her to visit me in Bogotá. Once I said, “Oh, I have a new friend, she’s a painter. Come to her place, you will see her paintings.” And she immediately said, “I have to make a movie.” I produced that movie because I had no choice!

Sarah was a wonderful mother. She gave us self-confidence. We grew up with this sense of freedom; there was no frontier for us. Now as an adult, I recognise how exceptional she was. Our father [Mário de Andrade] was a militant, and I’m sure she must have had fear every day because all his friends were killed, his brother was in jail, and Mário was persecuted by the police. When I look at their correspondence, I recognise how heavy it must have been. He had seven different nationalities and names. We knew that our father was involved in a revolution, but I never had the sensation that my father could have been killed, because Sarah was protecting us. She must have suffered, but she was really exceptional.