Sambizanga (1972)

Please review our required .

----------

In person: Annouchka de Andrade, daughter of Sarah Maldoror; Associate Professor Ellen Scott, UCLA Cinema and Media Studies.

Born Sarah Durados in rural, southwestern France to parents of West Indian and French descent, Sarah Maldoror was a multidimensional maker initially drawn to the Parisian theater scene where, in 1956, she co-founded France’s first Black theater troupe in collaboration with other artists of the African diaspora. Half a decade later she pivoted her creative focus to cinema, first studying under Soviet director Mark Donskoy in 1961 before working as assistant director to Gillo Pontecorvo on The Battle of Algiers (1966), a milestone of revolutionary cinema. Claiming that Black artists “are the only ones who should tell our history,” Maldoror—who changed her last name after an inspirational encounter with the 19th century poem, Les Chants de Maldoror—would forge her own visual transmissions of African culture by directing over two dozen films, including documentaries, fiction shorts, and feature-length narrative and television films. On April 13 of last year, 90-year-old filmmaker, theater artist and mother Sarah Maldoror passed away due to complications from the coronavirus. The African diasporic film director has been remembered over the past year in various posthumous celebrations of her life, and her creative force has become a singular subject of collective rediscovery thanks to the frontrunning curatorial sense of feminist film publication Another Gaze coupled with the efforts of Maldoror’s daughter Annouchka de Andrade, who has tirelessly labored to preserve and share her mother’s legacy.

Angola/France, 1972

When a dock worker in an Angolan port city is arrested for attempting to organize his fellow laborers, his wife, Maria (Elisa Andrade), makes the arduous trek from their small village to plead for his release. Director and co-writer Sarah Maldoror’s gripping adaptation of José Luandino Vieira’s novela recounts the events preceding the armed struggle against Portuguese rule beginning in 1961.

DCP, color, in Portuguese with English subtitles, 102 min. Director: Sarah Maldoror. Screenwriter: Claude Agostini, Sarah Maldoror, Mário Pinto de Andrade, Maurice Pons. With: Domingos de Oliveira, Elisa Andrade, Jean M'Vondo.

Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Image Retrouvée in association with Éditions René Chateau and the family of Sarah Maldoror. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers and UNESCO—in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna—to help locate, restore and disseminate African cinema.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, United States