“Maldoror is both presenting history and issuing a call to arms.”-Village Voice

“A courageous and powerful piece of filmmaking.”-Basia Lewandowska Cummings, Africa is a Country

In the first of a two-program tribute to Sarah Maldoror, we present Sambizanga, one of the first feature films made by a woman in Africa. Cowritten by her husband, a leader in the Angolan resistance, and "based on a novel by Luandino Vieira, a political prisoner of the Portuguese from 1961 to 1974, Sambizanga is a fictionalized chronicle of the arrest and fatal imprisonment of a man whose underground activities were an impenetrable secret to all around him. It was at a prison near the Luandan suburb of Sambizanga on February 4, 1961, that the first uprising of what was to become the Angolan resistance movement was staged. The film is set a few weeks before that uprising, during a time of increasingly desperate and repressive security measures by the colonial government. Rather than depicting the rebellion itself, Maldoror concentrates on the events leading up to it . . . It is worth noting, too, that Maldoror assisted Gilles Pontecorvo in the filming of The Battle of Algiers, a masterpiece of semidocumentary filmmaking and a seminal document in the history of that struggle".