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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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
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. -
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.