The Return of Amílcar Cabral

This film documents the festivities and different stages of an initiation ritual of a Balanta community in Guinea Bissau. The filmmaker Sana na N'Hada, belonging to that same community, at the time of the film production was himself not initiated. Many years later Sana na N'Hada finally experiences the process through Fanado, what produced the acknowledgement of a personal conflict with his own film: the modernist ethnological look casted upon the events, articulated with his comments in the French language contrasts with the ungraspable, implicated in the opacity of those practices.

The story of a woman who searches through the country for her husband, a resistant, while the war for independence is raging. She finds him at last and saves his life. When peace finally arrives, they have to learn how to be together again and start living in a destroyed land.

Guinea-Bissau, 1969. A violent war between the Portuguese colonial army and the guerrillas of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea. Nome leaves his village and joins the maquis. After years, he will return as a hero, but joy will soon give way to bitterness and cynicism.

A woman narrates the thoughts of a world traveler, meditations on time and memory expressed in words and images from places as far-flung as Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland, and San Francisco.

The first image is in black and white, upside down and projected into a black box that then becomes the frame. It now hovers like a time capsule near a man’s face. He looks down, listening in on a female guerrilla fighter and translating her words from Fulani. Within the capsule, money is counted and paid out as a new currency, the numbers of the years run backwards in the black box. A 16-mm film glides through the man's hands and is transferred to a laptop screen frame by frame.

The film tells the tale of Iala, whose authority over his two sons, Raul and Bedan, is shaken. Raul has left to study in a seminary in the big city, where unknown to anyone, he has joined the liberation movement. Meanwhile, younger son, Bedan is rebelling against every possible tradition, even eyeing his father's young bride-to-be.

As in the original paradise, the inhabitants of the Bissagos archipelago, located in the west coast of Africa, live according to ancient traditions and in absolute respect for nature, until a gang of drug dealers occupies their sacred islands. The medicine man dies and everything seems lost, until his young successor decides to fight the invaders to save the village.

The Mediateca Onshore in Malafo, a village in Guinea-Bissau, is an archive and a club for agropoetic practices. As Amílcar Cabral talks feminism on tape, the directors speak in the mangroves about the contradictions of depicting the community.