cinema2020

AngolaCINEMATOGRAPHY

The Angolan is one of the most politicized cinemas on the African continent, in keeping with the country's historical path. The A., in Portuguese hands since the 16th century, was for a long time the typical exploitation colony; in 1961 various independence movements (the most important of which was the MPLA, Popular Movement of Libertação de Angola) began guerrilla operations. After independence (1975), an uninterrupted civil war, albeit interspersed with long periods of respite, began between the various organizations, divided by ethnic and political reasons.The cinema mirrored the vicissitudes of the anti-colonial opposition and the civil war. In the 1960s, during the liberation war, the documentaries of the MPLA information and propaganda department constituted precious counter-information materials, which anticipated the subsequent works of the protagonists of the Angolan cinema. The first feature-length film, based on a work by the Angolan writer L. Vieira, was Sarah Maldoror's Sambizanga (1972) (a French woman with a father from Guadeloupe); shot in Congo, it tells with great expressive force, through the portrait of a stubborn female character, the rebellion of a people against the Portuguese dictatorship of A. Salazar: for this reason it was possible to project it into A. only after the end of colonial domination. was Sambizanga (1972) by Sarah Maldoror (a French woman with a father from Guadeloupe); shot in Congo, it tells with great expressive force, through the portrait of a stubborn female character, the rebellion of a people against the Portuguese dictatorship of A. Salazar: for this reason it was possible to project it into A. only after the end of colonial domination. was Sambizanga (1972) by Sarah Maldoror (a French woman with a father from Guadeloupe); shot in Congo, it tells with great expressive force, through the portrait of a stubborn female character, the rebellion of a people against the Portuguese dictatorship of A. Salazar: for this reason it was possible to project it into A. only after the end of colonial domination. 

The years immediately following independence were the most significant for Angolan cinematography, from 1977 to the early 1980s guaranteed and supported by the Instituto Angolano do Cinema, directed by L. Vieira. Important films include Antonio Ole's documentaries Resistencia popular en Benguela (1975), Carlos de Sousa and Costa's Retrospectiva (1976), the ten episodes of Presente Angolan from the Tempo mumuila (1979-1981) series by Rui Duarte de Carvalho ( a Portuguese who became an Angolan citizen after independence) and Memoria de um dia (1982) by Orlando Fortunato de Oliveira, between documentary and fiction, one of the best works. To remember also the numerous documentaries made in that period by the brothers Carlos, Francisco and Vitor Henriques: in particular, respectively, Asas da revolução, canhoes da libertade (1979), O golpe (1977), Revolução revolução (1980). Duarte de Carvalho was the first to shoot a locally produced fiction feature, Nelisita (1982): a political and visionary film, characterized by the use of black and white and based on the oral tradition of Nyaneka, a population of the South-East of the country. 

Film production then went into a serious crisis: Duarte de Carvalho had to wait until 1989 to shoot (but in Cape Verde) his second feature film, Moia, or recado das ilhas, also known as Le message des îles, built on the path of a woman who returns home to find her roots; and later the activity was kept alive only by a few short film authors, such as Zézé Gamboa (of which we remember Mopiopio, also known as Souffle d'Angola, 1990, a reconnaissance of the capital Luanda and its musical groups) and Mariano Bartolomeu (Un lugar limpio y bien iluminado, 1991; Quem fas correr Quim ?, 1992). In more recent years, the use of the video has allowed the A. not to disappear completely from the maps of African cinema. Social and political contexts,