Sarah Maldoror
Domingos de Oliveira, Elisa Andrade, Jean M'Vondo, Adelino Nelumba, Benoît Moutsila
96 mins
1972
AngolaFrance
15
Portuguese; Lingala
Yes
Digital
Part of the Women's Stories from The Global South (& To Whom They Belong) Season
Set in the weeks leading up to the guerrilla war for independence, Sambizanga focuses on the plight of a young couple. A riveting neorealist testimony to Angola’s anti-colonialist struggle, not screened in the country until after independence, this is an unforgettable revolutionary film and a passionate dramatisation of a pivotal moment in Angola’s fight for freedom adapted by Sarah Maldoror from a book by Portuguese-Angolan author and activist José Luandino Vieira. Maldoror was not only one of the first women to wield a camera and transform African cinema from then on, but a matriarch who did it to fight
oppression.
The film faced significant barriers to restoration due to a battle for ownership between the licence holder and Maldoror’s family, but, despite this, has continued to thrive in Angola as a cherished national artifact through a ripped copy broadcast consistently on television.
The restoration eventually came into being as part of the African Film Heritage Project – an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the FEPACI and UNESCO – in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna, to help locate, restore, and disseminate African
cinema.
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