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Matthias De Groof

Onder het witte masker: de film die Haesaerts had kunnen maken

Doc. expérimental | 4k | couleur | 9:0 | Belgique | 2021

"Under the White Mask: the film Haesaerts could have made" uses fragments of "Under the Black Mask", a 1958 film about Congolese art directed by the Belgian artist Paul Haesaerts and qualified as colonial propaganda. This new film imagines what the masks, now subjects and not objects, would say. Aimé Césaire's "Discourse on Colonialism" is spoken in Lingala for the first time. This speech is still a critical mirror for Europe. "Under the White Mask" is limited to elements already existing in 1958.

Matthias De Groof (1981) Belgium. Filmmaker and scholar. His award-winning films have been presented at venues like the IFFR, Cannes Pan-African Film Festival, Le FIFA and the Berlinale. His edited book “Lumumba in the Arts” is published with Leuven University Press, and reached the top-100 "books to escape the news" (LitHub). He has held appointments at the New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts; the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies; the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence of the Bayreuth University; and the Waseda University in Tokyo. Throughout is artistic and academic career, he was granted fellowships by the Canon Foundation, the KONE Foundation, Fulbright and BAEF. His filmography, produced by Cobra Films, includes “Under the White Mask” (2021), “Palimpsest of the Africa Museum” (2019), “Lobi Kuna" (2018), “Diorama” (2018) and “Jerusalem, the Adulterous Wife” (2008) among others.