Dancing at the revolution: the cinema of Sarah Maldoror

• ‘A Poet with a Camera: The Cinema of Sarah Maldoror’ runs from September to 4 October at BFI Southbank

How do we talk about Sambizanga? Sarah Maldoror’s best-known film is a pioneering work of African, feminist and anti-colonial cinema, an explosive piece of political filmmaking which has been, across the decades since its release in 1972, variously feted, censored, neglected and rediscovered. Its story highlights the way in which films centring marginalised perspectives often move in and out of circulation, kept alive on the fumes of reputation and rumour, as prints fall into disrepair and rights languish in bureaucratic purgatory. 

Where then, given all this baggage, this weight of history and hope, do we start with Sambizanga today? Perhaps simply with an image: a woman, with a baby on her back, walking. This woman is Maria (Elisa Andrade), and she is searching for her husband. Domingos (Domingos de Oliveira), a construction worker, has been abducted from the couple’s home in rural Angola by the police, who suspect he is part of an underground revolutionary network. Now Maria must embark on a long journey to find him, travelling from village to village, through a web of colonial obfuscation, arriving eventually at the gates of a hellish Luanda prison.

Sambizanga is told from several points of view; alongside Maria’s journey, Maldoror follows how the news of Domingos’s arrest spreads through Luanda’s underground whisper networks, and shows us his torture at the hands of colonial enforcers. But it is Maria’s story which lies at the film’s heart. Maria’s walk begins her arc, a journey from countryside to city, naïveté to political awakening, hope to tragedy. She is an everywoman who is drawn, by the cruel reality of colonial oppression, into a politicised life.

The sight of Maria walking is also, crucially, one of great beauty. As she walks, her purple headscarf and yellow dress glow, jewel-like, against greenery and mountains, captured on gorgeous 35mm. Close-ups reveal Maria’s sweat-soaked weariness, but the beauty of the light and landscape offsets this exertion, contrasting with the oppressive gloom of Domingos’s imprisonment. Rather than distracting from the film’s political content, its aesthetic underlines it. The revolution should be beautiful, argues Maldoror. Otherwise what’s the point?

The slogan ‘the personal is political’ has become a cliché, but there’s a reason why it keeps coming up when we discuss filmmakers adjacent to second-wave feminism. Sambizanga is not an abstracted public lecture on Marxist theory; it’s an intimate film, made by someone with skin in the game. Maldoror’s filmmaking was driven by a conviction that women like her should be telling their own stories. “African women must be everywhere,” Maldoror told the journal Écrans d’Afrique in 1995. “They must be in the images, behind the camera, in the editing room… They must be the ones to talk about their problems.”

Although she was not Angolan, Maldoror had many personal connections to Sambizanga. It’s tempting to see in Maria a stand-in for the filmmaker, a wife and mother herself, whose family life straddled political and artistic worlds. Maldoror’s activist husband Mário de Andrade, founder of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), lived away from the family for long periods, sometimes in hiding. Maldoror also travelled for work, but she took her daughters, Annouchka de Andrade and Henda Ducados, with her wherever she could. In a roundtable published by Another Gaze in 2022, Henda described what it was like to have a mother who “wore jeans and boots and her hair in a big afro, and [who] until the mid-70s answered the phone with ‘Ready for the Revolution?’” “Later on I was astonished to learn that so many major figures of the 1960s had stayed with us and sat at our kitchen table,” Henda says. “There were very few rules I remember her setting, but one of them was that guns should be left by the door.”

A closer examination of Maldoror’s life reveals further clues as to how her personal experiences shaped her work. Maldoror was born in south-west France in 1929, the child of a French mother and a Guadalupian father. Her birth name was Marguerite Sarah Ducados but she renamed herself, with a flourish, after a prose poem by the Comte de Lautréamont, the 19th-century French poet. This act of self-invention speaks to a romantic sensibility that runs through Maldoror’s work, offsetting the hard edges of her militant politics. In her twenties she co-founded one of France’s first Black theatre groups, and by the early 1960s she was attending film school in Moscow, alongside Ousmane Sembène. After graduation, she worked with Gillo Pontecorvo on The Battle of Algiers (1966), a key work of revolutionary cinema.

Maldoror’s first short, Monangambée (1969), shares many similarities with Sambizanga: both films adapt stories by the Angolan writer José Luandino Vieira, both feature political prisoners, and both star Elisa Andrade. Although Monangambée appears formally distinct – it’s 18 minutes long and shot on monochrome 16mm – the use of poetic, abstract imagery alongside a discordant free jazz soundtrack demonstrates Maldoror’s investment in combining political content with aesthetic wonder. Her first feature, Guns for Banta (1970), is now lost, but the story of its production – it was shot in a war zone in Guinea-Bissau and funded by the Algerian army – reveals how Maldoror’s political commitment shaped her filmmaking. After clashing with her producers, apparently over her focus on women resistance fighters, Maldoror was forced to leave Algeria, abandoning her only copy of the film. Given this context, her decision to focus Sambizanga largely on a female perspective gains even greater significance.

Maldoror’s desire to integrate political and emotional realities into her work is reflected in Sambizanga’s production, too. The script was co-written by her husband, who was active with the MPLA at the time. Getting permission to shoot in Angola would have been impossible, so the film was shot in Congo with a cast consisting largely of non-professional actors, including revolutionary fighters, who spoke a mix of Portuguese, Kimbundu and Lingala. For those fighters, the film documented fresh history. Set in 1961, the story charts events leading up to the Angolan War of Independence, which was still ongoing during the shoot. Angola would eventually achieve independence in 1975, nearly three years after Sambizanga was released.

Given the live nature of its subject matter, it’s clear that Maldoror meant Sambizanga to serve a pragmatic propaganda purpose. The film’s opening frames are crisply educative, first showing Angola on a map, then delivering a swift précis of the independence war via a scrolling text. Maldoror’s desire to teach the viewer is displayed in a scene set in a sewing workshop, where the revolutionary Mussunda (Lopes Rodrigues) talks a student through Marxist fundamentals. “You should know, there are no whites, mulattos or Blacks, only the rich and the poor,” he explains, cutting a piece of cloth. “The rich give in a way that keeps the poor poor, and work to keep the rich rich.” But Maldoror is less interested in leaders than in the ordinary people whose participation is crucial to the revolution. Maria’s journey is enabled by a network of women, children and elderly people who pass on messages, feed her baby and hold her in her despair. Maldoror’s revolutionary community is all-encompassing, an expansive vision that reaches out towards the viewer too, inviting us in.

If care lies at the heart of that community, so too does celebration. Towards the end of Sambizanga, scenes of mourning are intercut with those of a lively party. Against bright lanterns and dancing couples, Mussunda and his comrades learn that their brother has been killed. One by one, Maldoror rests her camera on their stricken faces. Their devastation is clear, but when Mussunda interrupts the band to announce the news, his message is unequivocal. “Let us continue because we are joyful,” he tells the crowd. “This is a day of mourning, but also a day of joy.” Without hesitating, Mussunda jumps back on to the dance floor, and the party resumes. Speechmaking shifts seamlessly to dancing; mourning to celebration.

The scene encapsulates the film’s overriding concern with community and human connection – collective mourning, collective joy and collective struggle. It’s fitting, then, that the story of its reception also centres on collectivity. Initially, Sambizanga received significant international festival attention, screening at the 1973 Berlinale and winning the top prize at the 1972 Carthage Film Festival (notably, however, the film was banned by Portuguese colonial authorities, and did not screen in Angola after the war had ended in 1974). Yet over the decades, while its reputation in feminist, anti-colonial and African cinema circles persisted, Sambizanga became hard to find. With its screening rights held hostage by a French distributor, the film circulated mainly in scratchy pirated copies.

Meanwhile, Maldoror kept working, completing 40 works for cinema and television across her career. She was resistant to festival tributes in her lifetime (“That smells like death,” she told Annouchka), but since her death in 2020, her daughters have advocated for their mother’s legacy, gathering her scattered filmography. In 2021, a restoration of Sambizanga screened at Il Cinema Ritrovato, and was greeted by critics and curators as a revelation.

It is thanks to this collective effort – by Maldoror’s daughters, and by the critics, curators and cinephiles who sought to keep the film’s legend alive – that Sambizanga is back in circulation today. That restoration lays foundations upon which a lasting legacy can be built. As of 2026, though, this 54-year-old film is only at the start of its journey into the canon. In 2022, Sambizanga made its first appearance in this magazine’s Greatest Films of All Time poll, at number 136. In an interview in the March 2023 issue of Sight and Sound, French filmmaker Alice Diop (Saint Omer, 2022) lamented the unavailability of films by trailblazing Black women filmmakers when she was young, naming both Sarah Maldoror and Kathleen Collins (Losing Ground, 1982) as recent discoveries. “I grew up without seeing [their] films,” Diop said. “It tells you something. It’s the erasure, the making invisible, of these terrific cinematic powers.” As Diop highlighted, the repression of landmark films by marginalised filmmakers causes real generational damage. The true extent of Maldoror’s legacy will only be felt in coming decades, as artists who have been able to encounter her films as they were meant to be seen, in their full beauty and power, begin to carve their own paths through cinema culture.