Alternate title(s):
Foreign Title:
Date: January 01, 2009 to December 31, 2009
Dates Note: 2009
Country of Origin:
Portugal
Place of Origin: Portugal
Languages:
Portuguese
Color: B&W
Silent: No
Based On:
Additional Info:
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.”