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WEDNESDAY, JUNE 15 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, JUNE 21 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JUNE 27 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, JUNE 30 – 10:00 PM

In collaboration with Maysles Documentary Center, Spectacle is proud to host a special screening of newly restored works by Madubuko Diakité. Born in Harlem in 1940, Diakité emigrated to Sweden in the late ‘60s where he would work as a filmmaker, pursue doctoral studies in film, and become a Human Rights lawyer. He still resides in Sweden but will be present at Maysles Documentary Center on June 12th for the screening, followed by a Q&A with Kelli Weston. 

Seen on their own, FOR PERSONAL REASONS (1973) and THE INVISIBLE PEOPLE (1972) remind us of the axiom, the more things change, the more they stay the same. While colored by different contexts, Black liberation and abolition today like then remain of high concern and importance. Anti-blackness and exclusion along racial lines today, like then, inform constructs of the nation.

Seen side by side the films highlight several motifs, of stark note are the ways in which Madubuko Diakité explores and immerses himself in the local in which he finds himself at the time. In both films we are introduced to the respective locals, New York and Lund, Sweden, through the lenses and experiences of two different Black men. In FOR PERSONAL REASONS, in the early 1970s a young Black man stumbles upon a Black Panthers protest in Brooklyn. He says, “…[t]hey were saying a lot of the things I had been thinking, about how freedom fighters and people from all over the world are fighting the same thing, imperialism, oppression.” While in THE INVISIBLE PEOPLE we encounter the plight of international students in Lund in the early seventies, who today, like then, face similar bureaucracy, exclusion and discrimination along racial lines. When one of the interviewees describes practices of institutionalized discrimination, noting how admissions to some fields of study are conducted along racial and national lines, recent events come to mind.

Watching the films in light of recent world events, including the discrimination Black people faced at the Ukrainian and Polish borders, one is reminded that anti-blackness is deliberate and continually structures the world, then and now. Immersed in the then, we are reminded now that while the struggle against imperialism and oppression starts and sprawls out from our respective locals, it is importantly, also an international one.

FOR PERSONAL REASONS
dir. Madubuko Diakité, 1973
23 min. United States.
In English.

Focusing on the Civil Rights Movement and a 1970 protest in New York, FOR PERSONAL REASONS was inspired by the Black Panthers and Malcolm X. An innovative mix of fact and fiction—a kind of critical fabulation—it juxtaposes militant speech with avant-garde jazz. The film won an Honorable Mention at the Grenoble Film Festival in 1973.

THE INVISIBLE PEOPLE
(DET OSYNLIGA FOLKET)
dir. Madubuko Diakité, 1972
30 min. Sweden.
In Swedish with English subtitles.

Diakité’s unique historical document, made together with Gary Engman and Nordal Åkerman, records the precarious living conditions of foreign students, immigrants, and in particular the African diaspora in southern Sweden in the 1970s.

* The new 2021 scan and subtitling of THE INVISIBLE PEOPLE was made possible by CinemAfrica, Story AB, Simon Klose, Rafaela Stålbalk Klose, Christian Rossipal, and the Afro-Swedish History Week (The Museum of Ethnography). The new 2021 scan of FOR PERSONAL REASONS was made possible by Nonami Film and Simon Klose, with Christian Rossipal as preservation consultant. The new 2022 scan of DREAMS OF G was made possible by Simon Klose, Christian Rossipal and Mansa Musa AB.

Special thanks to Cristian Rossipal, Inney Prakesh and Madubuko Diakité.