Retrospective The Colonial Question

Two founding moments of Guinean cinema and of the collaboration between Flora Gomes and Sana na N’Hada, hybrid gestures between fiction and re-enactment in search of the image of a country and of a people. Amílcar Cabral’s funeral, carried out with state honours after the independence, symbolises the birth of a nation, and Mortu Nega its cinematic birth.

The role of young Africans within French society, the clash between the dreams and the violence of colonial society that perpetuates itself way beyond the independence of the new African nations, in a session that combines the documentary gesture of cinéma vérité with one of the first fiction films by master Sembène.

These films, shot by militant and solidary filmmakers who challenged the censor- ship in France, condense the years of violence of the Algerian War—experi- enced in the present and at the battle- front in Algérie en flammes, or in the images brought by the exiled children in neighbouring Tunisia in J’ai huit ans— and the strength of the country’s hope in Year Zero of independence.

A session at the threshold of Angolan history, between the arduously conquered independence and the threat of civil war, in a brief moment of hope in the future of the young nation. This is also when the camera passes on from the hands of the European comrade filmmakers to the young Ango- lan filmmakers in a moment that the future did not deliver.

The recently recovered and restored work of Mario Marret was shot in the middle of the Guinean War and already briefly addressed the issue of bush schools, one of PAIGC’s main lines of action in the liberated areas. The relation between land, fight and learning are at the heart of the two films by Filipa César and Sónia Vaz Borges, based on the archive in the case of Navigating the Pilot School and on physical and sensory experience in the case of Mangrove School.

The beauty that runs through Carnaval da Vitória, which records the first Carnival in independent Angola in 1976, does not hide the trauma of twenty years of colonial war, then followed by the violence of civil war. Twenty years later, Sissako goes looking for a friend—and himself—and finds a country whose wounds defy historical simplifications.

This session takes place in the scope of the project FILMar, which is carried out by Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema, with the support of the Financial Mechanism EEA Grants 2020-2024.

Algeria is seen and told by young female students a few years after the end of the war in Ahmed Lallem’s film-inquiry. Twenty years after the independence, writer Assia Djebar throws herself into a musical film-essay, in which, beyond the borders of her country, she rethinks Maghreb and modern history.

Once the revolutionary dream that shook the European continent between 1967 and 1969 was crushed, the decade is marked by the radicalisation and marginalisation of the political movement. It is in such a context that these two films rethink the world, starting by focusing on Africa, where the fight still seemed capable of overthrowing the system.

In the mid 1950s, the encounter between Oumarou Ganda, then a young dockworker at the Abidjan harbour recently arrived from the Indochina War, and Jean Rouch, the engineer and film director, is a turning point in Rouch’s filmmaking with I, a Negro. A decade later, in Niger, Ganda makes his first film, the autobiographical Cabascabo.

The young Mozambican nation attracted plenty of filmmakers. Only a few films from that movement survived. Rouch likely directed Makwayela in the scope of a training for young technicians and filmmakers. Ruy Guerra, in turn, returned to his homeland after the independence and looked for the memory of the beginning of the colonial war in Mueda.

The films of Licínio de Azevedo, a dean of Mozambican filmmaking, revisit and rebuild his country’s recent history in a gesture oscillating between fiction and documentary. The issue of the land and its fruits at the heart of the colonial and post-colonial conflict crosses these two films, reminding the physical and economic aspects of exploitation.

The discussion about the historical debt of the colonisers to the former colonies is more topical than ever. One of its first film expressions is the seminal Afrique 50, by René Vautier, which led him to be censored and imprisoned. It is also the subject of a process set up by Sissako in a tradition- al African courtyard in the city of Bamako.

The film documents the everyday life of Lourenço Marques during the seven days of the week. After interviewing a series of passers-by in downtown Lisbon on what they knew about Lourenço Marques, the film included fiction sequences featuring the mixed-race woman Catembe. The Ministry of Overseas imposed a cut of 19’ of the 87’ that prompted a second, documentary version of only 45’, which was in turn forbidden by the Censorship Commission.

Screening followed by Debate
Cuts – on what they conceal and reveal

The Estado Novo censorship mutilated numerous films and may have explicitly or implicitly prevented the making of many others, namely about the Portuguese colonies of the time and about the war. Catembe, in particular, was screened as a fiction film, chopped up to the point of not making sense, reinvented as a documentary film, and then forbidden. It offers a unique opportunity to reflect upon that history, by confronting the film with its cuts.

Session in the presence of Faria de Almeida (director of the film). Debate in the presence of Maria do Carmo Piçarra (teacher and researcher) and Manuel Mozos (director), and moderated by Amarante Abramovici (Doclisboa programmer and curator of The Colonial Question Retrospective).

During Estado Novo, the sea had a major role in the making of an idea of colonial empire. Its cinematic representation is one of the most complex readings of a moving images history, where what stays off screen often reveals what one sought to impose, state or expose, which was plenty. Doclisboa and the FILMar project partner in a programme around those representations, thinking about the necessary programming and framing ways to insert those films into contemporary rhetoric.

This session takes place in the scope of the project FILMar, which is carried out by Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema, with the support of the Financial Mechanism EEA Grants 2020-2024.

Kuxa Kanema, the film project for and with the people of Mozambique that can’t help but to remind Medvedkin’s mythical cine-train, is told by filmmakers who carried it out, including Ruy Guerra. The mission to record the first steps of independence also included the harsh process of those accused of going along with the Portuguese coloniser.