Sarah Maldoror was born in 1939, daughter of a French mother and Guadeloupean father from Marie-Galante island. In 1956, she founded the theater group “Les Griottes” in Paris, which, through adaptations of Sartre and Aimé Césaire, studied the concept of “négritude”. She later won a grant from USSR in Guinea Conakry, and went to study at the Moscow Film Academy. There she met Ousmane Sembène, considered by some as the “father” of the African film. From the time she met Angolan nationalist Mário Pinto de Andrade in Paris, Maldoror plunged into the struggle for independence of the African colonies and witnessed the early days of the MPLA. Her first feature, entitled Monagambée (1968), examines torture techniques used by the French in the Algerian War, and was selected for the Cannes Film Festival Directors’ Fortnight in 1971. It was just the following year that Maldoror created her most emblematic work, Sambizanga (1972), filmed in Congo, which depicts the arrest of revolutionary activist Domingos Xavier by the Portuguese secret police from the perspective of a wife searching for her imprisoned husband.
