Short Films by Johanna Makabi

Short Films by Johanna Makabi

Inspired by what she calls “the interplay between the big story and the little story,” the Paris-born filmmaker of Senegalese Congolese heritage centers her insightful portraits of women and girls on their achievements and aspirations. Her elegantly wrought shorts, both fiction and nonfiction, bring the in-the-moment vividness of present-tense experience to the complicated histories of race and gender, joining a lineage of pioneers like Safi Faye in seeking truth and nuance.

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Short Films by Johanna Makabi
  • Notre mémoire
    11:39
    Notre mémoire

    Notre mémoire

    Directed by Johanna Makabi | 12 mins | 2021
    Mbissine Thérèse Diop, the underrecognized star of Ousmane Sembene’s masterpiece "Black Girl," reflects on the challenges and realities of her role in an epochal moment in cinema, at home in her Paris apartment.

  • Paulette the Clown
    01:55
    Paulette the Clown

    Paulette the Clown

    Directed by Johanna Makabi | 2 mins | 2021
    Paulette Nardal, Martinique-born pioneer of the Négritude movement, introduces herself and her critique, with a surprise visitor, in this elegantly staged visit to the past. Nardal is played by artist Christelle Oyiri.

  • Grâce
    13:58
    Grâce

    Grâce

    Directed by Johanna Makabi | 14 mins | 2022
    An 8-year-old girl—and frustrated cheerleader—believes that the sky is no limit as she seeks to join her father in space in Makabi’s wondrous portrait in imaginative self-determination.

  • A Laundry Day
    04:37
    A Laundry Day

    A Laundry Day

    Directed by Johanna Makabi | 4 mins | 2022
    Serendipity strikes at a Harlem laundromat where Fatou, a French African woman, meets a handsome stranger, in this homage to the French New Wave tinged with political meditations on American society.

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