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Sep 28, 2022 · In focusing on the everyday people engaged in struggle, in honoring women’s often overlooked contributions to revolutionary efforts, and in pushing back against both material imprisonment and the symbolic enclosures of colonial stereotypes, Sambizanga is a work of openness and redress.
Today BAMcinématek runs a 16mm print of Sarah Maldoror's essential Sambizanga (1972), a landmark of militant Third World liberation cinema, and likely the first feature film directed by a woman in Sub-Saharan Africa.
A searing, indelible portrait of anti-colonial struggle in 1970s Africa, Sambizanga is a forceful, stirring evocation of the Angolan population’s plight before the revolution and their intensifying political consciousness during it.
Sambizanga, her 1972 masterpiece on the Angolan liberation movement and the first feature film shot in Africa by a woman of African descent, slipped out of her control. The rights were sold by one French producer to another, who held them hostage for decades.
Based on a true story, SAMBIZANGA follows a young woman as she makes her way from the outskirts of Luanda toward the city’s center looking for her husband after his arrest by the Portuguese authorities—an incident that will ultimately help to ignite a national uprising.
A Guadeloupean of African descent, she is respectfully regarded as the matriarch of African cinema (she was the first woman of color to make a feature film). For her, filmmaking was a weapon for struggle and liberation from the very beginning of her experiences in cinema.
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Based on a true story, Sambizanga follows a young woman as she makes her way from the outskirts of Luanda toward the city’s center looking for her husband after his arrest by the Portuguese authorities—an incident that will ultimately help to ignite a national uprising.
