Doors 7:30p
Program 8:00p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We’re thrilled to come together with Annabelle Aventurin to present Réou Takh by Mahama Johnson Traoré! Réou Takh is the name given to Dakar by Senegalese from the countryside. A Black American eager to return to his roots is surprised to find a Westernized, depersonalized country.

This film will be presented within the Non-Aligned Film Archives programme, an ongoing programme curated by researchers and archivists Léa Morin and Annabelle Aventurin in collaboration with Open City Documentary Film Festival. The project aims to create a space to share films that have been neglected and overlooked – important works, many of which have been recently restored, that have been marginalised from dominant cinematic narratives. Each session revolves around a single lost work that is instead invoked through other films that have survived.

The following programme is based on an unrealised project by poet and playwright Abdoul War and filmmaker Med Hondo : Notes pour une série télévisuelle de fiction sur l’histoire de l’Afrique noire (Notes for a fictional television series on the history of Black Africa).
In the late 1980s, War and Hondo began working on a script for a 28-episode pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial history of Africa inspired by the writing of Burkinabe historian and politician Joseph Ki Zerbo.

Annabelle Aventurin and Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto will be in conversation following the screening. Come through!

Program

Réou Takh by Mahama Johnson Traoré

| 1972 | Senegal | 46’ | 16mm (digital transfer) | French spoken, English subtitles

Réou Takh is the name given to Dakar by Senegalese from the countryside. A Black American eager to return to his roots is surprised to find a Westernized, depersonalized country.

Program Duration: 46 mins

Hear Annabelle Aventurin & Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto in conversation about restoration vs. restitution.

Bios

Annabelle Aventurin is a Paris-based film archivist. She worked on the preservation and distribution of films by director Med Hondo at Ciné-Archives, the audiovisual fund of the PCF and the workers’ movement between 2020 and late 2023. She is also a programmer for various festivals and venues. In 2022, she completed her first documentary film, LE ROI N’EST PAS MON COUSIN cousin screened at numerous international festivals.

Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. Prior, she worked in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. She is the author of (Un)veiling Bodies: A Trajectory of Chilean Post-Dictatorship Documentary (Legenda, 2019) and coeditor of Nomadías: El cine de Marilú Mallet, Valeria Sarmiento y Angelina Vázquez (Metales Pesados, 2016). Her work has appeared in journals like Film Quarterly, Feminist Media Histories, and Jump Cut, as well as in numerous edited collections. Elizabeth is currently working on a book tentatively titled Transnational Experimental Television: The Global South on European Screens, for which she received a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is cofounder of the Latin American Women’s Audiovisual Research Network, RAMA.