There are two central episodes in the history of Mozambique in which cinema played an important role: the war of liberation (1964-1974) and the revolution (1975-1987). This history was recorded in images that represented both the anti-colonial struggle and the revolutionary process, creating correspondences between film forms and political structures. Many of these images were shot by foreign filmmakers who in turn helped train Mozambican operators. This was the case of some Canadians whose voices Catarina Simão retrieves in her film Archives du changement, in which she explores the relationship between these Canadian activists and filmmakers and the liberation movements of the sixties. This research was completed with the recovery, restoration and digitization of many forgotten works by these directors.
Then Simão’s film Five Minutes with Ruy Guerra is dedicated to the Mozambican film director and his film Mueda, Memória e Massacre (1979-1980), the first feature film produced by the National Film Institute and one of the most important works to have been made in Mozambique. Ruy Guerra, usually associated with the Brazilian Cinema Novo, occupied a central role in the discussion and implementation of cinema in Mozambique just after the country gained independence, defending with his practice the need to use poor, light, imperfect formats, where technical fragility was potentially aesthetic and, at the same time, a weapon of emancipation and universalization of the production of images.
Finally, Mueda 1979 examines a sequence of Guerra’s film about one of the main events in the history of decolonization, the Mueda massacre, capturing its theatrical reenactment. In his exploration of these images, the Portuguese artist finds certain significant details and gestures that show the continuing presence of the memory of colonial repression in the bodies and expressions of the group of people materializing this reenactment, almost two decades after.
Catarina Simão: Archives du changement, 2024, 30 min.; Five Minutes with Ruy Guerra, 2017, 5 min.; Mueda1979, 2013, 11 min.
Copies courtesy of the director. Digital screening, original version with Spanish subtitles. Talk in Spanish.
