Angela Davis: A World of Greater Freedom, by Manthia Diawara. With the presentation of the film by its author
As part of the public program of the exhibition Colonial Memory in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collections, the museum, in collaboration with Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary, is pleased to program the première in Spain of Manthia Diawaras’ film Angela Davis: A World of Greater Freedom, preceded by a presentation by the filmmaker himself.
In 2022, Manthia Diawara began documenting his conversations with US philosopher, writer, and activist Angela Davis in and around her hillside home in the San Francisco Bay area. Diawara’s camera follows Davis as she walks through a forest of giant sequoias, works in the garden, and walks her dog, all while reflecting on ideas including freedom, resistance, rebellion, political Blackness, radical Black thought, music, (Global South) feminism and sexual rights, and, most centrally, her life work on prison abolition. Neither a biography nor a fictional narrative, Angela Davis: A World of Greater Freedom offers a first-hand and accessible insight into Davis’s critical thinking, as well as her journey as an activist, now revered as a truly inspirational global political figure.
Through Diawara’s multifaceted cinematic exploration, viewers are presented with a practical toolbox of terms and principles that have guided Davis’s political philosophy that, while reaching for emancipatory horizons, never seized to call for new ways of knowing and the construction of different archives of thought.
Manthia Diawara is a Native of Mali, West Africa. He currently holds the title of Distinguished University Professor of the Arts and Sciences at New York University, where he teaches Comparative Literature and Film, and writes about the arts and cultures of the African Diaspora.
He is the recipient of several honors including the New York Chapter of NAACP Award, the PHI BETA KAPPA Distinguished Scholar, the Andy Warhol, the Rockefeller, Mellon, Ford, and Fulbright Specialist Awards.
Manthia Diawara is the founding Director of Africana Studies at New York University; the former Director of the Institute of African American Affairs, and founder of Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire magazine.
Diawara’s notable publications include books like In Search of Africa, We Won't Budge, An African Exile in the World, African Cinema: New Forms of Politics and Aesthetics, Black American Cinema; and films and video installations including: “Edouard Glissant, One World in Relation,” “An Opera of the World (Documenta 13),” “Negritude: A Dialogue between Soyinka and Senghor,” “The New Baroque of Voices (Sao Paulo Biennial 2021),” “AI: African Intelligence (2022)” and “Angela Davis, A World of Greater Freedom (Sharjah Biennale).”
With the collaboration of:
