Monangambee

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Monangambee is an irregular microcinema in Lagos, primarily taking place at the Jazzhole & hfactor, but rooted in a spirit of itinerant screening locations.

We also organize virtual screenings. Monangambee (formerly Is That Jazz) is a nomadic panafrican microcinema in Lagos, primarily based at the Jazzhole bookstore in Ikoyi, but also screening in a variety of other locations. Our screenings engage Black continental and diasporic filmmakers, as well as Third Cinema, and cinematic movements stemming from the Global South in general. We try as much as p

ossible to have the filmmakers present, in person or virtually, as the screenings are followed by discussions. Our name was decided as an homage to late Sarah Maldoror’s debut film, Monangambee (1969), in conversation with her daughter, Annouchka de Andrade. Set in Angola but shot in Algeria, Monangambee speaks to the fundamental misrecognition(s) between colonized and colonizers in a Fanonian vein, while also centering the possibilities of revolutionary care work. Quite fittingly, the name of the film is taken from a war cry colonized Angolans employed to warn of the approach of Portuguese slave traders.

08/02/2026

For Black Camera’s close up on Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga, we offer a few reflections on CARCERAL FRAMES, FUGITIVE DREAMS, a screening program we organized in 2021 at .co to commemorate/mourn the one year anniversary of the protests against police brutality in Nigeria and the brutal state-sanctioned massacre that ensued at Lekki tollgate. The program included the works of three militant filmmakers — Sarah Maldoror, Ousmane Sembene, Gadalla Gubara — to reflect on the ongoing carcerality of Black African life in colonial and “postcolonial” times, as well as histories of rebellion and protest.

Program:
MONANGAMBEE, Sarah Maldoror, Angola, 1968
SAMBIZANGA, Sarah Maldoror, Angola, 1972
TAUW, Ousmane Sembene, Senegal, 1970
LES MISERABLES, Gadalla Gubara, Sudan, 2007

It was only the second screening on the continent of the recently restored version of anticolonial landmark, Sambizanga, by Sarah Maldoror, after FESPACO, which speaks to the vexed circulations of many such works to the audiences they were meant for.

Find on this post our favorite moments/quotes from that discussion. Link in bio to read our full conversation!

14/01/2025

Join us for the last segment of our series of screenings, talks and workshops organized in collaboration between Lagos-based Monangambee and London-based Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA, ) with the support of the British Council (), engaging artists of African descent and the diaspora in conversation with John Akomfrah’s oeuvre, in terms of aesthetics, practice and social commitments.

TRICKSTERS is the last screening in this series, and will be available to be streamed from our website or ICA’s website worldwide from January 20-26, 2025.

We borrow our title for this program from one of the main characteristics of the orisha Èṣù in Yoruba spirituality and Ananse in Akan mythology. Tricksters hold a double edge — playful, mischievous and open to possibilities, they hold promises but also the risks and perils associated with uncertainty and irreverence towards colonial law and norms.

Program:

- Apapa Amusement Park, Karimah Ashadu, 2013, Nigeria, 3mn

- Liberty, Faren Humes, 2019, United States, 17mn

- On Freedom of Movement (wi de muv), Julianknxx, 2022, Sierra Leone, 5mn

- Specialized Technique, Igwe, 2018, Nigeria, 7mn

- Trading Memories, Olukemi Lijadu, 2022, UK/Nigeria, 3mn

- A Letter (side B), Larry Achiampong, 2023, Ghana, 20mn

Dates: January 20-26, 2025
Location: online (website link in bio), available worldwide

24/03/2023

The past week in images. Here are a few stills from the films our members are watching:

1. Chameleon Street (Wendell B. Harris jr, 1990) .nyx

2. They Call Me Babu (Sandra Beerends, 2019)

3. Bablinga (Fabien Dao, 2019) .nyx

4. I Am the One Who Brings Flowers to Her Grave (Hala Alabdallah, Ammar Al Beik, 2006) .mpg

06/03/2023

The past week in images, a few stills from the films our members are watching:

1. Looking for Hughes (Isaac Julien, 1989) .mpg

2. Spit on the Broom (Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, 2019) .nyx

3. baddDDD Sonia Sanchez (2015)

4. The Terror and the Time (Rupert Roonaraine, The Victor Jara Collective, 1978) .nyx

10/02/2023

The past week in images, here are a few stills from the films our members have been watching:

1. Saint Omer (Alice Diop, 2022) .mpg

2. Two (Satyajit Ray, 1965) .mpg

3. Black Wax (Robert Mugge, 1983)

4. Touki Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1973)

5. The Woman with the Knife (Timité Bassori, 1969) .mpg

27/01/2023

The past week in images, a few stills from the films our members are watching:

1. Bless Their Little Hearts (Billy Woodberry, 1983)

2. Insiang (Lino Brocka, 1976) .mpg

3. I Am Somebody (Madeline Anderson, 1970)

4. Les Filles Destinées (Valentin Noujaïm, 2021) .nyx

5. The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, 2022)

20/01/2023

The past week in images, five stills from what our members are watching:

1. Nanny (Nikyatu Jusu, 2022)

2. The Nine Muses (John Akomfrah, 2010)

3. Pillars (Haley Elizabeth Anderson, 2020) .mpg

4. Halpate (Adam Khalil, Adam Piron, 2020) .mpg

5. Chronicles of a Lying Spirit/ by Kelly Gabron (Cauleen Smith, 1992) .nyx

17/12/2022

Screening virtually on our website, three shorts by Onyeka Igwe alongside a conversation between the filmmaker and architectural designer/researcher Thandi Loewenson.

- Specialised Technique (2018)
- the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered (2019)
- a so-called archive (2020)

05/12/2022

It was a lovely time at Treehouse () last Saturday! Many thanks to everyone who was able to attend Archival Mappings, the screening of three films by Onyeka Igwe (). We look forward to seeing you all again soon!

There will be a virtual screening of all three films in the second half of December, so stay tuned for an update.✨

02/12/2022

A so-called archive (Onyeka Igwe, 2020, 19 minutes) screening TOMORROW, at 7PM, at

Synopsis: The work interrogates the decomposing repositories of Empire with a forensic lens. Blending footage shot over the past year in two separate colonial archive buildings—one in Lagos, Nigeria, and the other in Bristol, United Kingdom—this double portrait considers the ‘sonic shadows’ that colonial images continue to generate, despite the disintegration of their memory and their materials. Igwe’s film imagines what might have been ‘lost’ from these archives, mixing genres of the radio play, the corporate video tour, and detective noir with a haunting and critical approach to the horror of discovery.In Lagos, the former Nigerian Film Unit was one of the first self-directed outposts of the British visual propaganda engine, the Colonial Film Unit (1932-1955). A So-Called Archive documents a building largely emptied of its contents, finding desolate rooms full of dust, cobwebs, stopped clocks, and rusty and rotting celluloid film cans. The materials found in this building are hard to see, not only because of their condition, but also perhaps because people do not want to see them. Meanwhile, in Bristol Temple Meads, the former British Empire and Commonwealth Museum (2002-2009) was previously housed in the vaults of one Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s most famous railway designs. The museum included photography, film, sound and object collections from across the former British Empire. Like the Nigerian Film Unit building, this building too has been emptied of its content; the museum closed shortly after reported allegations of the illegal sale of several items from its collection. A So-Called Archive depicts these former archives—along with their histories of hoarding, monetisation, documentation and now abandonment—as metonyms for the enduring entanglements between the UK and its former colonies. (Mason Leaver-Yap).

Address: Awolowo Road behind Spar/YMCA Bldg. Unit 1, 7th Floor, Ikoyi. Enter behind bldg.

The screening will start sharply on time, and will last 1 hour. It will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker, Onyeka Igwe, in person!

30/11/2022

The names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered (Onyeka Igwe, 2019, 25 minutes) screening THIS SATURDAY, at 7PM, at

Synopsis: This is a story of the artist’s grandfather, the story of the ‘land’ and the story of an encounter with Nigeria—retold at a single point in time, in a single place. The artist is trying to tell a truth in as many ways as possible. So the names have changed tell us the same story in four different ways: a folktale of two brothers rendered in the broad, unmodulated strokes of colonial British moving images; a Nollywood TV series, on VHS, based on the first published Igbo novel; a story of the family patriarch, passed down through generations; and the diary entries from the artist’s first solo visit to her family’s hometown.Igwe pushes against the materials of the archive—its distortions, fabrications and embellishments—with her own kind of autofictional response. The artist summons a variety of artistic, literary and personal sources to create a singular biographical document of many strands. the names have changed throws the ordinary and the everyday within the archive into relief by daring to write and re-write the stories of diasporic African life against the grain of colonial history’s master narratives. (Tendai John Mutambu)

Address: Awolowo Road behind Spar/YMCA Bldg. Unit 1, 7th Floor, Ikoyi. Enter behind bldg.

The screening will start sharply on time, and will last 1 hour. It will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker, Onyeka Igwe, in person!

Address

Jazzhole, 168 Awolowo Road, Ikoyi
Lagos

Website

http://www.monangambee.org/

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