"Winnie"
Pascale Lamche's film screening
The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw invites the public to a screening of "Winnie", a film by the British director Pascale Lamche.
It is a documentary portrait of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the South African politician and activist, wife of the first black president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela. For years the scheme for presenting the history of this pair and their involvement in the fight against the apartheid regime was captured by the title of Charlie Mingus’s famous album from 1963: The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. But Lamche’s film undermines the image of Winnie Mandela as the “baddie,” portraying her unique charisma and devotion to the cause of freedom and the struggle over the image at home and abroad of her husband, who was imprisoned for nearly 30 years.
“But what is really astounding in South Africa,” said Lamche, “is that on both sides of the apartheid divide—with the white Afrikaner nationalists and the black nationalists—they agreed on what a woman should be, which is to be a wife and stay at home and toe the line. And of course Winnie never toed the line: she was volatile and uncontrollable, and that was punished.”
Lamche won the Directing Award for World Cinema Documentary for Winnie at the Sundance festival in 2017.