SAMBIZANGA
Genre
Drama
Running time
97 minutes
Year
1972
Language
Lingala and Portuguese
Subtitle
English
Country
Angola and France
Director
Sarah Maldoror
Bio
Producer
Cast
Elisa Andrade, Jean M'vondo, Dino Abelino, Benoît Moutsila, Talagongo , Lopes Rodrigues, Henriette Meya, Manuel Videira
Scriptwriter
Maurice Pons, Mario De Andre
Sarah Maldoror, a pioneer of African film-making, brings a woman’s perspective to the explosive beginnings of the Angolan war of independence. Shot in the Congo, her film is adapted from a novella called The Real Life of Domingos Xavier by Jose Luandino Vieira, which was itself based on real events. The Sambizanga district of Luanda was home to a Portuguese prison where militants were incarcerated and tortured under the colonial regime. The film follows the radical Maria (played by Cape Verde economist Elisa Andrade) as she searches for her missing husband Xavier. His discovery in Sambizanga triggers an attack on the prison by the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola – of which Maldoror’s own husband was a leader – and, ultimately, a national uprising. According to British critic Mark Cousins, the cast of activist non-professionals brings conviction to a film that is as beautifully lit as a Caravaggio painting.
Other movies
CROCODILE TEARS
Director: Tumpal Tampubolon
On a Crocodile Farm in West Java, Indonesia, a young boy reaches puberty, and his problems with his mother start. Johan, a young man tethered to his mother, Mama, by invisible but unbreakable chains, dreams of freedom yet remains under her suffocating grip. Isolated from the world, their life on the farm is a tense routine of survival and emotional manipulation, disrupted only when a young woman’s arrival threatens the delicate balance. As Johan begins to see through Mama’s relentless hold, he confronts the painful reality of their bond: is it love, or is it tyranny? Director Tumpal Tampubolon dives deep into the tangled web of family loyalty and control in this haunting drama raising timeless questions about family, power, and the cost of independence.
FAMILIAR TOUCH
Director: Sarah Friedland
Anchored by a precise and sensitive performance by 79-year-old theatre actress Kathleen Chalfant, Sarah Friedland’s debut film – made in collaboration with the residents and care workers at a Los Angeles retirement home – shows the experience of dementia from this elderly woman’s own point of view. Her son, whom she mistakes for a date, takes her to the care home that she thinks is a hotel bar. Once a professional chef, she takes over the kitchen for a morning, then escapes to go to a produce stall, bits of reality she can still grasp. Her triumph is to find the life worth living where she is, as she is. A celebration of the human mind, in all its complexity.
LUMIÈRE, LE CINÉMA
Director: Thierry Frémaux
A contemporary film collating works shot by Louis and Auguste Lumiere from the earliest years of cinema, superbly preserved and restored by the Lumiere Institute in Lyon. Cannes Film Festival director Thierry Frémaux provides an informative commentary as toddlers squabble, a magician performs a trick and a train pulls into a station; the score is by Gabriel Faure, a composer favoured by the Lumiere brothers themselves. More than a hundred short films of 50 seconds each, provide a window both into ordinary life around the turn of the 19th century – not only in France but in places as far-flung as Japan and Algeria - and the wonder felt at the Lumieres’ astonishing invention, the cinematograph, a miracle whose magic continues.
