For Black Camera’s close up on Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga, we offer a few reflections on CARCERAL FRAMES, FUGITIVE DREAMS, a screening program we organized in 2021 at hFACTOR to commemorate/mourn the one year anniversary of the #endSARS protests against police brutality in Nigeria and the brutal state-sanctioned massacre that ensued at Lekki tollgate. The program included the works of three militant filmmakers — Sarah Maldoror, Ousmane Sembene, Gadalla Gubara — to reflect on the ongoing carcerality of Black African life in colonial and “postcolonial” times, as well as histories of rebellion and protest.

Program:
MONANGAMBEE, Sarah Maldoror, Angola, 1968
SAMBIZANGA, Sarah Maldoror, Angola, 1972
TAUW, Ousmane Sembene, Senegal, 1970
LES MISERABLES, Gadalla Gubara, Sudan, 2007

It was only the second screening on the continent of the recently restored version of anticolonial landmark, Sambizanga, by Sarah Maldoror, after FESPACO, which speaks to the vexed circulations of many such works to the audiences they were meant for.