Ar Condicionado (Air Conditioner, 2020)

I’m just following up my Global Cinema piece on Angola with another, more recent, film from that country which was recently given its international premiere online by the We Are One Film Festival, via YouTube, having screened for the first time only earlier this year at the International Rotterdam Film Festival. You don’t see much cinema from the country, for fairly obvious reasons, but I thought it worth representing a more modern take on some of the same issues.

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It’s really all about the tone this film, the sort of dreamlike atmosphere that suffuses the world through which Matacedo (José Kiteculo) wanders. He’s some kind of maintenance guy (or concierge, or security perhaps) in a crumbling Luanda apartment block, where air conditioning units have been falling off. He has a problem with his ears, allowing the film to just move into wordless almost surreal sequences at times. In this, the camerawork and sound is crucial, allowing the film to be both heightened and magical while still very much grounded in its class consciousness: there’s a shouty boss who is very insistent that his air conditioning gets fixed, pushing Matacedo and his colleague Zezinha (Filomena Manuel) into action. You get the sense that maybe the air conditioning itself is a symbol of a class divide in a country which has been pulled apart by war until only relatively recently; the crumbling infrastructure is just one way in which society has been stretched and broken by this extended period. But while that all looms in the background, Matacedo is just trying to get by, and his relaxed groove is what the film is ultimately trying to convey, pretty successfully I think.

CREDITS
Director Fradique [Mário Bastos]; Writers Fradique and Ery Claver; Cinematographer Ery Claver; Starring José Kiteculo, Filomena Manuel; Length 72 minutes.
Seen at home (YouTube), London, Thursday 11 2020.

Global Cinema 5: Angola – Sambizanga (1972)

Angola is a country which has been beset for most of its independent existence by war, and continues to be hugely impoverished, so its no surprise there isn’t a huge cinema coming from there. Even the most prominent filmmaking linked to the country isn’t really funded there; Sarah Maldoror was married to a prominent leader in the MPLA, and her films about the country and its colonial troubles were funded by the French, and Sambizanga filmed in the bordering Republic of Congo (aka Brazzaville). Still, it’s very much a film about the situation in the country at a febrile time just leading up to its independence.

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Republic of Angola
population 25,789,000 | capital Luanda (6.8m) | largest cities Luanda, Lubango (601k), Huambo (595k), Benguela (555k), Cabinda (550k) | area 1,246,700 km² | religion Catholicism (56%), Protestantism (37%) | official language Portuguese (português) | major ethnicities Ovimbundu (37%), Ambundu (25%), Bakongo (13%) | currency Kwanza (Kz) [AOA] | internet .ao

With a coastal plain along the Atlantic ocean and an inland plateau, divided by a mountain range, this is the seventh largest country on the continent, and has a tiny exclave of Cabinda just to the north, divided from the rest of the country by the DRC. The name comes from the Portuguese colonial name, itself derived from the title ngola held by kings in the highland region. Early nomadic tribes gave way to Bantu in the first millennium BCE, and a number of kingdoms were established thereafter in the region. The Portuguese came in the late-15th century, first explorer Diogo Cão, then establishing a trading post; they founded Luanda but had little control over the interior regions until the 19th century. Post-WW2 nationalist movements led to the founding of the FNLA, UNITA and the Soviet-supported MPLA, and independence declared on 22 November 1975. Agitation between these groups then led to a Civil War (with support coming from Soviet and US factions), which lasted sporadically until 2002. The country has yet to recover, and droughts have compounded problems. The government is led by a President, who had been José Eduardo dos Santos for 38 years until 2017.

The first cinemas were built in the 1930s, but many are now in disrepair. After so many years of war, understandably there is very little money available for filmmaking in the country, though there was a small boost in the 2000s after the Civil War concluded.

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Sambizanga (1972)

I’d long hoped to see this film — and still do hope for a proper restoration — but it took the director’s recent passing for me to seek it out online, albeit in a poorly-kept print transferred badly to YouTube. However, some films you need to accept how they are if you want to watch them; in some ways, the poor quality and bad subtitling just adds to the film, which deals with Angolan liberation. It’s named for the area in Luanda where the prison is located to which our hero, Domingos (de Oliveira) is taken. He’s a member of the liberatory resistance to Portuguese colonial rule, and is grabbed from his workers’ shack in a nearby community by armed police. The film then intercuts his own tribulations in prison with his wife searching fruitlessly for him in the various prisons in the capital city, as well as other resistance workers trying to discover who this man is who’s been captured. It has the simple power of Soviet cinema in some respects, as it lays out the terms by which independence is fought for in an oppressive colonial system.

CREDITS
Director Sarah Maldoror; Writers Claude Agostini, Maurice Pons, Mário Pinto de Andrade and Maldoror (based on the novel A vida verdadeira de Domingos Xavier “The Real Life of Domingos Xavier” by José Luandino Vieira); Cinematographer Claude Agostini; Starring Domingos de Oliveira, Elisa Andrade; Length 102 minutes.
Seen at home (YouTube), London, Saturday 9 May 2020.

Three Short Films by Sarah Maldoror

I think if we’ve all learned anything from the last few decades of study and research about women in cinema is that there has been a paucity of women creating cinema since the silent era, i.e. from when cinema started to be seen as a viable industry and not just a hobby or a sideshow. This means a lot of women’s work in cinema has been in non-commercial spheres like the experimental avant garde, or else in oppositional contexts, and that is where we find the French/West Indian filmmaker Sarah Maldoror, who chose her surname and began to make films with her Angolan nationalist husband after having been an assistant on The Battle of Algiers. That first short I review below was also made in Algeria, but is specifically about the Angolan situation, before its independence. She made a feature film a few years later, Sambizanga (again filmed in absentia in the Republic of Congo/Brazzaville, but about Angola), which I will be covering shortly in my Global Cinema series when we get to Angola. Sadly, Maldoror died earlier this year, in April 2020, as a result of complications from COVID-19, at the age of 90. The three short films below were made available for a short time by Another Gaze journal, in support of a panel featuring her daughters, poetry recital, and a discussion amongst film critics, which was insightful and also, for me, rather unusual in centering the experiences of African and Caribbean women.