Aimed Caesar. Mask of words

In 1941, André Breton, fleeing occupied France, ends up in Martinique. Entering the store on rue Victor Hugo, he comes across the first issue of Tropiques — published by Aimé and Suzanne Césaire. This chance encounter becomes one of the key moments in the post-war shift of surrealism: from Europe to the Caribbean, towards anti-colonial thought and the nascent notion of négritude.

A few decades later, Sarah Maldoror — a pioneer of African cinema, a participant in the independence struggles in Algeria and Angola — returns to this story. Her film about Aimé Césaire shows the poet not as a monument to literature, but as a figure of political and linguistic resistance. In it, Césaire speaks of poetry as a “spare lung” — a tool for survival in a world that colonialism has made unbreathable.

Maldoror unfolds a theme that has often been sidelined in the history of surrealism: its encounter with anti-colonialism and black modernity. Tropiques — despite the Vichy censorship and the 1943 ban — becomes one of the most important places of this confrontation, and Martinique a space where surrealism is taken over and rewritten.