Luandino Vieira

Domingos is a member of an African liberation movement, arrested by the Portuguese secret police, after bloody events in Angola. His wife goes from a prison station to another, trying in vain to find out where he is.

Documentary about the life and work of the writer Luandino Vieira – one of the most solid and brilliant voices in Portuguese-language literature. "Green Ground of Written Birds" follows Luandino Vieira's return to Tarrafal, where he lived for 8 years as a political prisoner. It is from there that part of the stories of Portugal, Angola, and Cape Verde on their way to African independence is retold. Just months away from the year when Portugal will have lived as long under democracy as under dictatorship, this documentary is made from the struggle for freedom from within the prison, from the living memory of those who crossed time and faced it through a new literature.

Filmmaker-griot coming from the theater, it was with a camera, while the war in Vietnam occupied everyone's minds, that Sarah Maldoror gave visibility to the African wars of decolonization: Angola, Guinea Bissau, French Guinea, Cape Verde... Her short film Monangambée addresses the torture by the Portuguese army of a sympathizer of the Angolan resistance. At the end of editing, Sarah Maldoror approached the members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago during a Parisian concert and offered to add sound to her film. The next day they watched the film, were convinced and recorded their first soundtrack for free as evidence of African-American solidarity. Shot in Algiers, Monangambée is a film about torture and, more broadly, about the incomprehension between the colonized and the colonizers. It is based on a novel by the Angolan writer Luandino Vieira, then imprisoned by the Portuguese colonial power.