Sambizanga (1972) by Sarah Maldoror - introduced by Ana Naomi de Sousa as part of the ‘OTHER CINEMAS’ weekender.

Sambizanga was made in 1972 by the French Guadeloupan filmmaker Sarah Maldoror, and it’s set in Angola during the early 1960s, when the independence struggle against the Portuguese colonial occupiers began. The screenplay for the film was written by Maldoror’s Angolan husband, Mario Pinto de Andrade, a poet and independence intellectual.

The film is an adaptation of a book called The true life of Domingos Xavier by Luandinho Vieira, which he wrote based closely on factual events and his own experiences.

Sambizanga was written partly from Luandinho Vieira's own experiences of his first incarceration by the Portuguese regime, in 1959 and revolves around factual events that marked the beginning of the Angolan armed anticolonial struggle against the Portuguese, in February 1961.