Sambizanga (Maldoror, 1972): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.40pm
This is part of the Censored to Restored season at BFI and also screens on July 30th.
Sight & Sound review:
This is the
first feature in Africa to be directed by a woman. Set in 1961, at the
start of the Angolan War of Independence, and shot in Congo, the film
tracks the resistance efforts of the Popular Movement for the Liberation
of Angola (MPLA), a militant group whose
leader Mário Pinto de Andrade was also Maldoror’s husband. In part, it’s
about the arrest and brutal torture of a tractor driver, Domingos
Xavier, who lives in a working-class district of the capital city Luanda
and harbours seditious beliefs such as, “There are no whites, no
mulattos, no blacks. There’s only the poor and the rich.” She
gives equal importance to his wife Maria who, carrying along her infant
child, sets out to find him, going from one prison to another,
confronting indifference, lechery, dead ends. In her suffering, she
becomes a kind of Mother Angola. Her doggedness and her heartache are
portrayed with wounding acuity and illuminate Maldoror’s much-quoted
belief that “African women must be everywhere. They must be in the
images, behind the camera, in the editing room and involved in every
stage of the making of a film. They must be the ones to talk about
their problems.” Yet
Maria’s plight is not solely African or colonial; a dogged seeker of
justice, she resembles the desperate women in Zhao Liang’s documentary
Petition (2009). For the director, she evokes “the alone-ness of a woman
and the time it takes to trudge… It could be any woman, in any country,
who takes off to find her husband.”
Sukhdev Sandhu
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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