October
8, 2004
Ousmane
Sembène to Screen Moolaadé, 2004 Winner At Cannes
Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène,
one of the most prominent figures in African cinema, will visit
Mount Holyoke October 19 to screen his most recent film Moolaadé.
The screening, at 7 pm in Gamble Auditorium, will be the first
showing at an academic institution for Moolaadé, which
won the Un Certain Regarde prize at this year’s Cannes
Film Festival. A question-and-answer session will follow the
screening.
On the following day, October 20, a conversation
with Sembène will take
place at 4 pm in the New York Room of Mary Woolley Hall.
Moolaadé tells the story of four young girls in a small African village
who revolt against the tradition of female genital mutilation. They seek the
help of a woman in the village who offers them moolaadé, or “protection,” against
their seizure by the male elders of the village. Protection of the weak is also
a powerful tradition, and those who violate moolaadé face a penalty of
death.
“The film is constructed on the tension between these two conflicting values,” said
Samba Gadjigo, an MHC professor of French who is Sembène’s biographer
and provided the English and French subtitles for the film. Moolaadé supports
the world community in its condemnation of female genital mutilation as barbaric,
and is also more broadly “a metaphor for women’s liberation and the
liberation of African peoples,” Gadjigo said. He added that women’s
issues and the emancipation of African peoples have long been the concern of
Sembène, who dedicated Moolaadé to “mothers, women who fight
for the abolition of this leftover of a time past.” He is making his third
visit to Mount Holyoke.
“Sembène’s patient camera loves his Africa; his gorgeous accomplishment
is not just in laying out a forceful argument against female circumcision but
in treating the traditionalists, too, with dignity and the kind of compassion
that allows people to embrace difficult change without humiliation,” reviewer
Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote in the July 4 issue of Entertainment Weekly after seeing
the film at Cannes. She called Moolaadé a “riveting movie that,
with the right distribution deal, has the power, truly, to change the world.
After the screening (which left many in tears), the audience rose in a standing
ovation.”
Sembène’s appearances at MHC are
sponsored by the Offices of the Dean of Faculty and the Dean
of the College; the Center for Global Initiatives; the Weissman
Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts; the Hubbell Fund;
the Departments of Women’s Studies, French, Earth and Environment,
and Film Studies; the Smith College Department of Art; the Hampshire
College Program in Film, Photography, and Video; the University
of Massachusetts Department of Anthropology; and the Five College
African Studies Council.
The
counter is
1,317
|
