About Us
We are a vision and creative driven, film and arts marketing and impact distribution collective focused on bringing projects which explore futurist, liberation and decolonial narratives as well as stories both fiction and documentary challenging capitalist notions of tradition and history. Based in New York City but with roots around the world, Sambaza Collective is inspired by the drive to develop and find the spaces in which we can meet around a desire to build and develop a new way forward. Guided by the Alkebulan proverb that we are the stories we know and believe, Sambaza aims to bring more stories onto screens, into classrooms and our individual and collective spaces, urban and rural which expand how we think about ourselves.
The name and vision of our work is inspired by the Maori understanding of whales who are symbols of the bounty within each of us and whose appearance hold deep meaning as representatives of our ancestors. We envision our work as our “song” to find those who are listening. Today, whales have also come to be one of the most endangered species as a direct result of our current world-order, one which requires massive human communal effort and re-imagining of human ways if they are to survive. At its core, whales represent that which is in many ways at stake, should we continue on the path we are on. Sambaza comes from the Swahili word “to distribute” and its parallel reference to fish.