Gold Songs

Shooting on 16mm film in Mozambique, director Ico Costa explores the textures of human behaviour as he follows young men who wonder what lies beyond their immediate surroundings. In the fragments of conversations captured in the Maputo market, a recording studio and on coconut trees, we find daily routines and tedium lead to chit-chat on desire, money and hope. In the interplay between performance and document, poetry emerges from fleeting everyday moments.

A group of Indigenous Achuar children that moves self-determined through the endless green. Along the course of the Pastaza river, on the border between Ecuador and Peru, they catch fish, hunt and cook, play with lianas and watch videos on their smartphones. Director Inês T. Alves respectfully follows the everyday life of this young collective living in deep connection with one another and with the environment.

Different groups of people wander in a rainy, windy, dark world. They spend time together, trying to get away from their depressing jobs, meandering constantly towards a disturbing surreal queer fantasy.

Life is not the most fulfilling for sixteen-year-old Meng: Lounging at home with his grieving father on a daily basis, being excluded from his family’s past, and forced into bullying other kids at school. Everything changes when he is thrown into a life-altering adventure that propels him into an exciting unfamiliar landscape.

When her mother dies, 40-year-old Helena now has time for herself after years of taking care of her family. She works at a film production company, dances boisterously, gets drunk. A quiet film about letting go morphs into a coming of middle age story.

In a mountain village in the north of Portugal, a murder occurred. A sixteen-year-old boy leaves the house barefoot, under the cold night, towards the forest. For thirty kilometres he walks, up and down the mountain. He has one single thought in his head.

Henrique lives alone in the mountains in Portugal. Having his children been taken away by the social services, one day he searches for the psychologist in charge of the process to get some sort of vengeance. From then on, he hides in the forest for several days, trying nothing but to survive.

In Hindu mythology, RAHU is the severed head of a demon responsible for swallowing the sun and causing the eclipses. It is also Alex Zhang Hungtai, David Maranha, Gabriel Ferrandini, Júlia Reis and Pedro Sousa, all five in the dark, in circle, vociferating to each other, with their arms their feet their nerves, a growing, raw tension, without term, sipping restlessness through a testimony of the exploratory music in contemporary Lisbon.

Balane 3 is a neighbourhood in Inhambane. Inhambane is a city in Mozambique. Mozambique is a country in Africa. Africa is not just what you see on TV. In other words, Balane 3 is a documentary about the lives and times of the inhabitants of Inhambane, a city in the south of Mozambique. Like any other people in the world, the characters in this film work as car washers, fishermend or butchers, they go to school, hospitals, barbershops and street markets, they drink and dance at night, they talk about diseases, politics, friends, love and sex. They talk a lot about sex.

A dive into the heart of Timkat, a fascinating purification ritual in which moments of joy, trance and religious devotion reveal a certain pride in national identity.

In 2020, unable to travel, Ico Costa left a small camera with Ailucha and Domy, two young Mozambicans from the city of Inhambane, and asked them to film their daily lives. The result: working, playing, walking, hanging around, smoking, listening to music, singing, dancing, feeling desire – being teenagers.

X, a film location scout, spend his time travelling from place to place looking for filming locations, at the same time that he's looking for funding for the film he wrote himself. In the middle of nowhere, as in the nowhere of his life, he stumbles on Y, the woman for whom he has been waiting all his life.