"In a striking scene, Macuacua holds up a tree branch shaped like a rifle and reenacts a patrol route from his youth with astonishing matter-of-factness. As his muscle memory kicks in, the past and the present collapse together to startling effect."
"While this approach embodies the slipperiness of memory, it also renders the film difficult to follow on occasion. But across these streams of oral history, what we find are not merely facts and figures, but feelings, in which pain and healing entwine."
The Mozambique civil war, lasting from 1977 to 1992, deeply affected the nation's psyche. Inadelso Cossa's film examines this trauma through personal family history. He interviews his grandmother, whose dementia affects her reliability. The film blends reality and imagination, enhanced by evocative cinematography. Cossa also features other witnesses, including a former soldier, Macuacua, whose reenactments reveal the haunting presence of the past. The film prioritizes non-traditional documentation, capturing emotions intertwined with pain and healing, despite occasional difficulty in following the narrative.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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