Raquel Lima

Paulina Chiziane in Mozambique, Elisa Lucinda in Brazil, and Raquel Lima in Portugal have their daily lives revealed and altered in the exchange of nine letters that cross the Atlantic and its colonial history. Desires, anxieties, and struggles to continue as writers in the diaspora are presented in a poetic narrative of sounds, spiritualities, and bodies, in which their existence challenges racism, sexism, and xenophobia, looking towards the future of the Portuguese language and its speakers.

Proposes a speculative meeting between the Baron of Água Izé, the first nobleman in the Portuguese colonies of the 1800s who was of mixed European and African ancestry, and Maria Correia, the Black Princess of Príncipe Island in the 1700s. Reanimating them through the bodies of contemporary artists, the film uses dance, poetry and music to weave profound threads between the past and the present. Transcending space, time and language, their encounter wrestles with questions of culpability, power and the exploitation of both land and Black bodies.