DSA Emerge is committed the development of Marxist cadre in our movement. Among other things, this means redoubling our commitment to political education. In that spirit, we encourage comrades to join us each month as we view and discuss films about the history and promise of global liberation struggles in a series called The Revolution Will Be Streamed.

This month we are screening Sarah Maldoror's Sambizanga, a landmark film about the Angolan liberation struggle made as it was still unfolding. Using a spare narrative in which an Angolan woman named Maria has to navigate the byzantine network of colonial incarceration to find out where her husband Xavier, a member of the MPLA, is being held, Maldoror manages to communicate a complex portrait of colonialism and its discontents. Weaving together communal networks of counter-surveillance - from informal modes of feminist resistance embodied by Maria and mothers in her village, to the vanguard of the MPLA proper, to solidarity between prisoners and contributions from villagers around Luanda - Sambizanga also presents a cultural affirmation of their efforts.

As anti-imperialists and police/prison abolitionists, the portrait of jail support networks and the work required to sift through police department misinformation after arrests, the amount of overlap between apartheid Angola and any US police department is both damning of our present conditions and - given ongoing rebellions to #endSARS, #freeHaiti, #shutdownAFRICOM - a bridge to the ongoing international struggle against imperialism and neo-colonialism.

RSVP here for links to watch the films via Twitch stream at 6:30 pm and a post-screening discussion on Zoom directly after!

Sambizanga (104 minutes)