Tomorrows that (un)sing
At independence, the efforts of the Institut National de Cinéma (INC) focused on making newsreels that were shown throughout the country in itinerant screenings. These were called "Kuxa Kanema", and their aim was to emancipate the people. The country produced just over 300 of them, as well as a number of documentaries. Portuguese filmmaker Margarida Cardoso compiled fragments that survived the 1991 fire of the INC building in her documentary Mozambique, journal d'une indépendance (2003), which also documents the arrival of foreign directors, including Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Rouch and Ruy Guerra, who came to contribute their know-how and make films in a country where everything still had to be built. Guerra, a Portuguese born in Mozambique before migrating to Brazil, directed Mozambique's first feature-length film, Mueda, mémoire et massacre (1979), a reconstruction of a traumatic episode that marked the beginning of the war for independence: the massacre of indigenous demonstrators by the Portuguese government in the town of Mueda in 1960. It is reported that in a largely illiterate country, films by Tarkovski, Wajda, Einsenstein and other illustrious filmmakers were shown in the evenings at public screenings. Myth or reality, this policy was soon aborted, due to a situation that was made catastrophic by the civil war at the turn of the decade. Cinema is an expensive means of expression, and it's no coincidence that one of the few fiction films made during this period is a Yugoslav co-production, Time of the Leopards (Zdravko Velimirović, 1985), which looks back at the war of independence through the classic storyline of two friends who find themselves on opposite sides. Música, Moçambique! (José Fonseca e Costa, 1981) and Chante mon frère, aide-moi à chanter (José Cardoso, 1982), celebrations of Mozambique's musical heritage, are among the few films of the period to strike a slightly happier note.
Mozambique and its ghosts
Production companies sprang up on the ruins of the war from 1991 onwards, timidly reviving buried desires for cinema, but it would be some years before Mozambique was the setting for real feature films, most of them the initiative of filmmakers from abroad, a sign that local production remained largely dependent on foreign capital. The career of Licínio Azevedo, a compatriot of Ruy Guerra's who has lived in Mozambique since 1977, was in its infancy, before taking off in the following decade. The Garden of Another Man (Sol de Carvalho, 2006) follows the poignant tribulations of a young woman who wants to become a doctor in a country plagued by corruption and AIDS. Two motifs haunt most of these films: on the one hand, the war of independence, as in Le Rivage des murmures (2004), which adopts the point of view of a young Portuguese woman who has come to join her husband in Maputo, interweaving women's emancipation and decolonization, and the civil war that followed, as in Comédia Infantil (Solveig Nordlund, 1998) and Portuguese director Teresa Prata's adaptation of Mia Couto's novel(Terre somnambule, 2007), both of which feature a child as the main protagonist. Yvonne Kane (2014) is a new investigation, this time in the present, into the spectres of colonization and the hopes that succeeded it. These ghosts also run through Miguel Gomes' Taboo (2012), shot partly in Lisbon and partly in Mozambique, likened to a lost paradise in the Gurué district, a romantic reverie that either fascinates or bores (a question of mood?).
Fiction for the benefit of reality
In Licínio Azevedo's latest film, which alternates between documentary and fiction, a train bound for Malawi serves as a thread through a country torn apart by civil war, contrasted by the imperturbable magnificence of its natural landscapes(Le Train de sel et de sucre, 2016). In 2005, Azevedo directed Un camp de déminage, a documentary about former soldiers turned deminers. It's a mine that triggers the magically realistic narrative of Mabata Ba (Sol de Carvalho, 2017), a new adaptation by Mia Couto. The filming in 2001 of some of the African scenes inAli, Michael Mann's biopic of Muhammad Ali, seemed to mark a turning point that has yet to materialize. Hollywood still only comes to Mozambique to shoot in dribs and drabs. Blood Diamond (Edward Zwick, 2006), supposedly set in Sierra Leone, is an opportunity for a few local enthusiasts, such as Mickey Fonseca, to learn about Hollywood methods. It took him ten years to raise the necessary funds for his first 100% Mozambican feature film, Resgate, a thriller that is currently touring festivals. Mosquito (João Nuno Pinto, 2020) is an opportunity to remember the East African campaign, and that Mozambique was like one of the last margins of the First World War on the heels of a Portuguese soldier whose dreams of heroism are lost in the middle of the jungle. Argentinian Eduardo Williams' El augel del humano (2017), a film on the borders of artistic installation, balances between amateurism and formalism, as an impressionistic chronicle of youth in Mozambique, Argentina and the Philippines, whose remoteness is as if abolished by the Internet. Food lovers won't want to miss the episode of No Reservation (2012) devoted to Mozambique by the late Anthony Bourdain, which, as usual, goes beyond the culinary realm, revisiting the ruins of Beira's Grand Hotel, still used today as a refuge for thousands of homeless people and the subject of Licínio Azevedo's documentary Les Hôtes de la nuit (2008). But for how long? The present seems to be smiling on Mozambique at last, as shown by the resurrection of Gorongosa National Park and its wildlife, a sign of stability at last rediscovered and chronicled by a number of documentaries.
