Sambizanga

Description

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".

• Written by Maldoror, Mario de Andrade, Maurice Pons, based on the novel by Luandino Vieira. Photographed by Claude Agostini. With Domingos de Oliveira, Elisa Andrade, Dino Abelino, Talagongo. (102 mins, In Portuguese with English subtitles, Color, 16mm, From the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts)

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http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/film/FN21915

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