Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project №4. Sambizanga (1972) + Prisoners of the Earth / Prisioneros de la Tierra (1939)

Sambizanga (1972) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069214/
This revolutionary bombshell by Sarah Maldoror chronicles the awakening of Angola’s independence movement. Based on a true story, Sambizanga follows a young woman as she makes her way from the outskirts of Luanda toward the city’s center looking for her husband after his arrest by the Portuguese authorities—an incident that will ultimately help to ignite a national uprising. Featuring a cast of nonprofessionals—many of whom were themselves involved in anticolonial resistance—this landmark work of political cinema honors the essential roles of women, as well as the hardships they endure, in the global struggle for liberation.

Prisoners of the Earth / Prisioneros de la Tierra (1939) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0176049/
Shot on location in the jungle, this gut-punching work of social realism by Mario Soffici—one of classic Argentine cinema’s foremost directors—simmers with rage against worker oppression. Desperate men are entrapped into indentured labor on a yerba maté plantation under the brutal foreman Köhner—a situation made tenser by the fact that both Köhner and a worker named Podeley love Andrea, the sweet-spirited daughter of the camp’s doctor, and that eventually boils over into an explosive rebellion led by Podeley. The expressionistic cinematography of Pablo Tabernero feverishly evokes a place where suffocating heat, economic exploitation, and cruelty lead inexorably to madness and violence.

Extras:
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