• 48
  • 48
  • A Story from Africa
  • A Story from Africa
  • Soldier Playing with Dead Lizard

48

Susana de Sousa Dias’s remarkable, hypnotic film is composed of photographs from the archive of the Portuguese army, taken upon the arrest of political prisoners during the forty-eight years of dictatorial regime in Portugal and its colonies (1926–74). As prisoners stare out at us, we hear their reflections on their time in prison, recorded by de Sousa Dias decades after the Carnation Revolution, and are invited to contemplate what a photograph reveals and what it conceals. A sequence featuring testimony of Mozambican anticolonial resistance fighters, accompanied by slowed army footage shot in Guinea-Bissau, acknowledges what is missing from the archives. Sousa Dias reflected, “I came to realize that there is a reason for the colonial wars having been a kind of taboo in Portugal for the first three decades after the Revolution: The people who had been in Africa fighting in the colonies were the very same people who carried out the revolution.”

FILM DETAILS 
Language
  • Portuguese
  • with English subtitles
Print Info
  • B&W
  • DCP
  • 93 mins
Source
  • Kintop
Preceded By

A Story from Africa

Billy Woodberry, Portugal, 2019

When Billy Woodberry investigates a series of disturbing archival photographs, he learns they were taken in Angola during the Portuguese “pacification campaign” of 1907. He wrote, “I sought to unleash the violent movements to conquer captured in the photographs, while assigning frequency to the sounds and cries of a defeated world the photographs bear, and project forward into the tumultuous future of the twentieth century Africa.”

FILM DETAILS 
Print Info
  • B&W
  • Digital
  • 32 mins
source
  • Divina Comédia

Soldier Playing with Dead Lizard

Daniel Barroca, Portugal, 2008

Filmmaker Daniel Barroca described the film: “The source material for this work is a collection of snapshots that my father brought with him from the war in Guinea-Bissau. What we see here is my gaze as someone from the generation after the war, someone trying to make sense of that traumatic past.”

FILM DETAILS 
Print Info
  • B&W
  • Digital
  • 9 mins
source
  • Daniel Barroca

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