Cléo Diára signs a historic role here. Not as a token of diversity on a European poster, but because she carries in her the contradiction of her POV, never throwing it back at the viewer as pedagogy. She’s simply magnetic, sensitive, at times insolent, provocative; or as a NYFF text puts it, she “mixes strength, sensuality, and vulnerability” and stands out as the film’s emotional backbone. It’s no surprise she won the Best Actress Award in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section, a gesture of resonance for a Capeverdean-Portuguese actress working in a circuit where legitimacy is still a bareknuckle spar. Those New York critics went further: a “fierce” and “star-making” role. All true.
These names are part of a list, whose same logic inspired another list composed of the names of several children from a Portuguese public school to be read by the Portuguese (neo) colonial-fascist party in Parliament, which exposed these same children to hatred and violence (in Portugal as in Palestine). The list I have partly copied above is a document, perhaps a list of those arriving in a slave ship, which the Portuguese filmmaker Dulce Fernandes included in her latest film, Tales of Oblivion.
Cléo Diára signs a historic role here. Not as a token of diversity on a European poster, but because she carries in her the contradiction of her POV, never throwing it back at the viewer as pedagogy. She’s simply magnetic, sensitive, at times insolent, provocative; or as a NYFF text puts it, she “mixes strength, sensuality, and vulnerability” and stands out as the film’s emotional backbone. It’s no surprise she won the Best Actress Award in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section, a gesture of resonance for a Capeverdean-Portuguese actress working in a circuit where legitimacy is still a bareknuckle spar. Those New York critics went further: a “fierce” and “star-making” role. All true. 
These names are part of a list, whose same logic inspired another list composed of the names of several children from a Portuguese public school to be read by the Portuguese (neo) colonial-fascist party in Parliament, which exposed these same children to hatred and violence (in Portugal as in Palestine). The list I have partly copied above is a document, perhaps a list of those arriving in a slave ship, which the Portuguese filmmaker Dulce Fernandes included in her latest film, Tales of Oblivion. 
