Mortu Nega (Gomes, 1988): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 9pm
This 35mm presentation, also being screened on June 30th, is part of the Pan-African film season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review:
One of the best contemporary war films I know is this singular 1988
feature, the first by Guinea-Bissau filmmaker Flora Gomes (Po di
sangui). The first half, as elemental and as unadorned as Samuel
Fuller’s The Steel Helmet, concentrates on women fighting alongside
guerrillas at the end of Guinea-Bissau’s war of independence in 1973,
attacked by Portuguese helicopters as they travel on foot close to the
border. The second half, more diffuse and at times more rhetorical,
deals with the ambiguous conditions of the war’s aftermath. The title
means “those whom death refused,” and true to that notion the heroine
(Bia Gomes) has been fighting for about a decade. Gomes (no relation to
the director) manages to convey the loss of her children in a wordless
and underplayed moment that shook me to my core. Flora Gomes appears in a
cameo as president of a postwar sector.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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