Maputo Nakuzandza A love letter to Maputo with crossed narratives

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Maputo Nakuzandza A love letter to Maputo with crossed narratives
Maputo Nakuzandza A love letter to Maputo with crossed narratives

Africa-Press – Mozambique. Brazilian director Ariadine Zampaulo presents at the Porto/Post/Doc film festival in Portugal, her first feature film, “Maputo, Nakuzandza”, a love letter to the Mozambican capital where she lived, with multiple intersecting narratives.

Made in the style of other commercial films dedicated to cities, from Berlin to New York, this mosaic presents itself as “a fragmentary portrait of a city where documentary, fictional and performative elements merge with radio and fables into an urban symphony”.

Dedicated to “the small events of everyday life”, this “film-poem” aims to show, in a single day, several intersecting stories. It premiered at the Olhar de Cinema festival in Curitiba, Brazil, and has already screened at the International Documentary Festival in Marseille, on France.

This “ode to a city”, Ariadine Zampaulo explained to Lusa, stemmed from a 2017 Fluminense Federal University exchange programme, which brought her to the Mozambican capital to study.

The director met several other creators, from theatre to cinema – highlighting Mozambican actress and stage director Maria Clotilde Guirrugo who wrote the script with the director – and then the idea arose of “producing something together” with that group of Mozambican artists, the actors joining in the writing of the story.

“It is a film that places the city at the centre.

I already had this relationship with the city, liking it a lot, being very curious about the stories of the people here, the buildings, the architecture,” Ariadine says.

The title word ‘nakuzandza’ means “I love you” in Changana, the language spoken in the south of Maputo. The film combines “various stories” and fragments inspired by conversations and contacts with many people in the capital.

“The radio was already thought of as a way of sewing these stories together. But then it was something I worked on in post-production,” Ariadine says about a sound track that connects the various narratives.

She was interweaving Mozambican literature and poetry in the stories, and her research also led her to discover cinema made in Mozambique, in Africa, and which in this country “is strongly related to the immediate moment of independence”.

“The cinematography here is very much tied up with the stories of colonial relationship, of revolution and independence, which are always being discussed and revisited,” she says.

This colonial relationship with Portugal, from the past to the present, is linked to her own experience as a Brazilian. “They touch us very deeply, because we end up identifying with each other.

In our case [in Brazil], it was much earlier, but the colonial processes remain, in different ways. The very structure of society reproduces these logics,” she explains.

The director also finds links in “the racial issue”, which she was already researching in the context of Brazilian cinema and found again on Mozambican soil.

In cinema as a “tool for recreating the collective imagination”, she found “many similar things, without going through a Lusophone culture”, between the two countries, even to “understand[ing] Brazil as a nation of strong African origins”.

“I’m very happy because the film is reaching many places in Brazil, and now it arrives in Portugal. It was shown in France. The importance lies in this, the purpose and the fight for independent cinema to be able to occupy all these spaces,” she adds.

The colonial issue arises not only because of the proximity to names such as the Mozambican writers Noémia de Sousa and Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, who she quotes, but also because one of the film locations was Vila Algarve, a building which once housed the PIDE/DGS [secret police] in Maputo during the dictatorship of the Estado Novo, and now “it’s just a ruin over there”.

The “architecture of the city makes the colonial question apparent” and cannot be extracted from the film, which arose “from a desire to experiment and talk about more urgent themes”, subjects that are presented here “as a provocation to foment debates”.

“It just places these fragments, suggestions, and maybe the purpose is not to deepen or explain, but just to put this in image, poetry, performance,” she conjectures.

‘Maputo, Nakuzandza’ premiered in Mozambique in September this year at the Eduardo Mondlane University School of Arts and Communication (ECA).

Today’s screening at Cinema Passos Manuel in Oporto, Portugal, also includes ‘Solmatalua’, by Brazilian Rodrigo Ribeiro-Andrade, and the debut ‘short’, “A Morte Branca do Feiticeiro Negro”.

This film “proposes a mystical itinerary where the ancestral strength of poetry, memories and black experiences in Brazil is celebrated” past, present and future.

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