Death and negritude: Bekolo's Miraculous Weapons.

This article analyzes Jean-Pierre Bekolo's 2018 film *Miraculous Weapons*, which won the Sembène Ousmane Prize at FESPACO and draws its title from Aimé Césaire's 1946 poetry volume, a foundational text of the negritude movement. The film meditates on themes of death, life, art, and negritude—defined as a Black cultural and philosophical affirmation—within a postcolonial African context marked by race, identity, and freedom struggles. Through the story of Djamal, a prisoner on death row, Bekolo explores whether negritude and art, including poetry and cinema, can symbolically "erase the traces and the symbols of death" amid ongoing postcolonial tensions. Stylistically, the film employs vivid colors, drone shots, and innovative rack-focus techniques to embody negritude's paradoxes and emotional depth, while narratively suggesting that love, particularly marital love, alongside negritude art, may serve as "miraculous weapons" that transcend death and affirm Black identity and immortality.