[1] The film takes place partly in Sambizanga, a working-class neighbourhood in Luanda that housed a Portuguese prison where many Angolan anti-colonial militants were tortured and killed.
[2] Domingos Xavier, a revolutionary, is arrested by colonial authorities and taken to the prison, where he faces threats of torture unless he discloses the names of his fellow activists.
[3][4] Sambizanga was based on a 1961 novella by José Luandino Vieira, a white Angolan writer born in Portugal who had served a 11-year prison sentence for his work in the anti-colonial struggle in Angola.
[7] Writing in The Village Voice, Michael Kerbel compared Sambizanga to Soviet Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 film Battleship Potemkin in terms of its political significance.
[9] Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike praised Sambizanga for its feminist themes, writing that it "gives female subjectivity special attention, as it pertains to revolutionary struggles... the feminist aspect of the film becomes apparent... as it is aimed at giving credibility to women's participation".