A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Showing posts with label Sambizanga. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sambizanga. Show all posts

Monday, July 7, 2025

Sambizanga (Sarah Maldoror, 1972)

Elisa Andrade in Sambizanga

Cast: Elisa Andrade, Domingos de Oliveira, Jean M'Vondo, Dino Abelino, Benoît Moutsila, Talagongo, Lopes Rodrigues, Henriette Meya, Manuel Videira, Ana Wilson (voice). Screenplay: Sarah Maldoror, Maurice Pons, Mário de Andrade, Claude Agostini, based on a novel by Luandino Vieira. Cinematography: Claude Agostini. Film editing: Georges Klotz. 

Sarah Maldoror's Sambizanga is a tough, heartbreaking portrait of Angola struggling for independence from colonial rule, focused on the arrest, torture, and death of a revolutionary leader called Domingos Xavier (Domingos de Oliveira) and the attempt of his wife Maria (Elisa Andrade) to discover what has happened to him. Beautifully filmed and performed by a mostly non-professional cast, many of whom had ties to the revolutionary movement. It was shot in the neighboring Republic of the Congo. 

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