As a child, filmmaker Inadelso Cossa was shielded from the cruel reality of Mozambique’s civil war. Now he visits the village of his youth, in a penetrating, sensory search for the ghosts of the past.
Thirty-two years after the end of Mozambique’s civil war, in which a million people died, the smell of terror still hangs in the air. As a child, Inadelso Cossa was shielded from the cruel reality. Now he visits the village of his youth with his sound recordist Moises in a sensory search for the ghosts of the past.
Conversations with villagers—including his grandmother, who has dementia, and a former rebel, who drinks to forget—are punctuated by shots of family photos strewn among the leaves or an empty chair against the same background. In a personal voice-over, Cossa reflects on the past, and how it resonates in the present, casting a shadow over the future. The memories he encounters are sometimes faded, fictionalized or distorted, and past and present seem to merge, especially in the dark of the night.In this dream-like atmosphere, Cossa, who previously evoked his country’s violent past in A Memory in Three Acts (2016), now creates a penetrating, poetic ode to a people marked by collective trauma.