One of the first feature films made by a woman in Africa, Sambizanga is a fictionalized chronicle of the arrest and fatal imprisonment of a man whose underground activities were an impenetrable secret. It was at a prison near Sambizanga, Angola, on February 4, 1961, that the first uprising of what would become the Angolan resistance movement took place. The film is set a few weeks before that moment, during a time of increasingly desperate and repressive security measures by the colonial government. It is worth noting that Maldoror assisted Gilles Pontecorvo in the filming of The Battle of Algiers.