CINEMA REBORN - FEBRUARY NEWSLETTER - 'Tell no lies': Four anti-colonial films by Sarah Maldoror and Flora Gomes

Cinema Reborn always hopes to draw its programme of new restorations from all corners. Our 2026 season will include two programmes devoted to the rich but virtually unknown cinema of Africa.  These programmes will be presented on a single evening in both Sydney and Melbourne.

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Mortu Nega (Dir. Flora Gomes, Guinea-Bissau, 1988)

4K Restoration, Australian Premiere

‘Gomes often says that cinema is rhythm, music, and above all, light. His enormous sensitivity to social nuance and his tempered optimism fill in the chiaroscuros of the everyday.’ – Ela Bittencourt, Metrograph Journal

The year is 1973 – the tail end of Guinea-Bissau’s eleven-year war against Portuguese colonial rule. A woman, Diminga (Bia Gomes), searches for her wounded partner, Sako (Tunu Eugenio Almada), among the rebel forces at a military camp. When the story seamlessly skips ahead to the mid 1970s, guerilla warfare has given way to the couple’s life together as celebrations in their fledgling nation are dampened by straitened conditions.

The first fictional feature film produced in independent Guinea-Bissau, Mortu Nega dwells – as its title loosely translates – on ‘those whom death refused’. Flora Gomes’s representation of the struggle of everyday life as just another kind of war, and of how challenges are dealt with through tools and processes embedded in the native culture, echoes and fulfils the desire expressed by the revered anti-colonial leader, pan-Africanist and poet Amílcar Cabral: for Bissau-Guineans to film their own people, country and liberation.

The latest restoration from Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, Mortu Nega is 

part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film 

Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers 

and UNESCO – in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna – to help locate, 

restore, and disseminate African cinema.

Introduced by Lucia Sorbera at Ritz Cinemas and Guido Melo at Lido Cinemas

For session times and tickets at the Ritz click on this link

For session times and tickets at the Lido click on this link

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Festa: A Trilogy by Sarah Maldoror (France, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau 1979–1980, 91 minutes)

Australian Premiere, 4K Restoration

‘In this trio of shorts, Sarah Maldoror interweaves culture, tradition and politics, somewhere between documentary and poetry, culminating in a singular result.’ –Annouchka de Andrade

‘In today’s times, it’s hard to imagine an artist – a Black woman, no less – being so principled yet so prolific, particularly in a medium as capital-intensive as cinema.’ – Devika Girish, The Film Comment Letter

Best known for her radical and groundbreaking 1972 film Sambizanga (Cinema Reborn 2022), Sarah Maldoror directed more than 45 shorts, documentaries and feature films from the 1960s until her passing in 2020. In 1979, having chronicled the anti-colonial liberation movements of Angola and Guinea-Bissau, Maldoror travelled to the islands of Cape Verde to document the nation’s first years of independence from Portuguese rule. Immortalising the period before the Guinea-Bissau coup d’état of November 1980, in which the union of the two countries was broken, Maldoror produced three shorts: Fogo, l’île de feu (1979, 33 mins), Cap-Vert, un carnaval dans le Sahel (1979, 28 mins)and À Bissau, le carnaval (1980, 30 mins). Forming a loose trilogy, these poetic documentaries beautifully capture the jubilance of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau’s Carnival and May Day preparations and festivities, serving as a testament to culture as the foundation of liberation.

Introduced by Annouchka de Andrade via video link.

For session times and tickets at the Ritz click on this link

For session times and tickets at the Lido click on this link

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MULTI-TICKET DISCOUNT PASSES

We are responding to public demand by introducing a discount pass for those who want to see the maximum of Cinema Reborn at the lowest possible price. Five ticket passes are $80 and ten ticket passes are a super-bargain at $140. Each ticket allows a maximum of two redemptions per session.

To buy a pass for sessions at the Ritz click here and fill in the box for which Voucher you wish to purchase

To buy a pass for sessions at the Lido click here and fill in the box for which Voucher you wish to purchase.

EARLY PROGRAMME ANNOUNCEMENTS

We have already announced a bundle of titles that will screen in our 2026 season. For information about session times and links to bookings head to the Cinema Reborn website

CHARITABLE DONATIONS

Cinema Reborn charges regular Ritz and Lido admission prices with the lowest student discount tickets of any festival. We keep to these admission charges thanks to tax deductible donations from our friends and supporters. We have once again set up a page via the Australian Cultural Fund to receive donations of any size, large or small. You can find it IF YOU CLICK ON THIS LINK

Bill