This condition ensured that we took on the production of the film without fear of making mistakes and also as an antidote to the idleness and uncertainty of the future. A good example is the stadium scene: when I wrote it, I imagined a crowd, but then Covid arrived and we couldn't even fit five people in. I was never afraid, because I know that reality and this mixture of magic forced me to find other ways of representing the same feeling. I know it may sound theoretical, but I think it's very real and rational. Because we're used to living like this in Angola. We have to make do with what we have, even for movies.
Afroscreen
09.06.2025 | by Marta Lança
A lifetime of bleeding and crying. A lifetime of undoing the body to understand the body, to receive the body. This is configured in many ways. A woman disconnected from her womanhood loses her hair, loses her scales, becomes a porpoise. And a porpoise is a man, even if it’s a fish, and even if it’s female. A thing, ladies and gentlemen, is a thing. The other is a porpoise, and a porpoise is a porpoise, a woman is a woman, one is slippery and the other isn’t.
Body
04.06.2025 | by Manuella Bezerra de Melo
Dear racialized friend, we both feel the weight, so let me end here as it’s getting late, when we talk about racism, whiteness and privilege, don't ever forget to create contexts, don't repeat the same claims as if they were refrains, don't talk about the system as if it operated and oppressed in the same way everywhere, with no aims or changes or such affairs, or as if the context of blacks in the USA was the same as that of blacks in Portugal, and of blacks in Brazil, and from there to blacks in Guinea.
To read
04.06.2025 | by Marinho de Pina
I also think his music is quite special, and he was a very special person. He was very generous, doing a lot of social work, working with street children. He was very engaged in working for a society in the ‘90s that was starting to develop its own independence, since it was formally declared in 1974. It's not just his music, it's also the way he uses stories about the people that live in Santiago, in the interior and rural areas of the island.
Face to face
28.05.2025 | by Graham Douglas
It’s about contesting narratives: not only narratives about Africa, Africans, Capeverdeans, and about our diverse perspectives, but also narratives about what cinema is, and what it can be, who gets to watch and be watched, who gets to speak and be heard. It is slow but necessary work. It is the work of re-inscribing our collective imagination with images that belong to us and that, in turn, transform us, and then the world.
Afroscreen
29.04.2025 | by P.J. Marcellino
The Black body is one of the boring, limiting terms that abound in decolonial discourse. The fact that it is an unknown or almost unknown term in Guinea-Bissau (I’ve no idea if I need statistics to say this), makes me wonder: how do you decolonize Africa without Africans being involved?
To read
22.04.2025 | by Marinho de Pina
What is a person? It's a threshold question, as if it could only be asked in the passage between an end and a beginning, at a moment when the list of the virtues of human existence is exhausted, dries up, and we finally see that what we thought was properly human is, after all, shared with other beings. In its tendency to move away from purist differentiations governed by exclusive properties, science not only fails to offer this guarantee, but has contributed to shattering the logic of unity, of restriction, of what is, in short, singular.
Body
19.04.2025 | by Marta Rema
I kept my grip on the spot, my feet firmly rooted, almost glued to it. I needed to propel myself forward, but I didn't know how. As if my body had forgotten one of its capabilities. I couldn't even understand if the urge I felt was rational or if it was coming from my gut, or from the voices I heard urging me to fall, because the body was resisting and, when the body resists, we must listen to it, accept that resistance, that insistence on self-preservation.
I'll visit
19.04.2025 | by Liliana Coutinho
The author argues that racism and sexism, institutionalized as patriarchy, are at the base of the social structure, in this case in the United States, but can be extrapolated to many other societies, such as our own. By criticizing the various feminisms that have left out the experiences and social places of black women, she shows how they have had to carve out their own path of resistance. T
Body
01.04.2025 | by Marta Lança
Maybe that's the secret of satire: behaving like Schrödinger's cat: for every side that wants it dead, there's an opposite side that keeps it alive. But this is just a maybe, I barely know enough about humor, let alone physics, to know if the metaphor is actually applicable.
I'll visit
01.04.2025 | by Pedro Goulão
Jasse considers how the various European colonial projects shared the similar aim, for which they competed, of access to all sorts of resources for the economic benefit of their elites – a reality that, now being propelled under new globalized guises by new (alongside the same old) agents of so-called progress and development, is far from over.
I'll visit
25.03.2025 | by Ana Balona de Oliveira
He tells us about the important and complex mission that Amílcar Cabral delegated to them and what it was like to learn the crushing news of his assassination in the middle of this process. It fell to him as his first job to film Amílcar Cabral at an exhibition on the struggle in Conakry, in 1972, and then the transferring of his body to Bissau, capturing the commotion of the Guineans at the death of their greatest thinker and anti-colonial resistance leader.
Face to face
17.03.2025 | by Marta Lança
In Portugal, on one hand, leftists can use decolonization as that apologetic pat on the back, in an orgiastic self-flagellation of White guilt, always reiterating how Whites are horrible and privileged bastards who only know how to hurt the rest of the world. Apparently, this absurd and self-centered mea culpa makes the world fairer and abracadabrally fades away all issues of oppression. On the other hand, even right-wingers can use it to further fuel their unfounded hatred and their glimpses of grandeur, based on a romanticized past of conquest and domination as a show of intellectual and racial superiority.
Mukanda
10.03.2025 | by Marinho de Pina
Despite being financially autonomous and not feeling personally discriminated against, Maria Eugénia was sensitive to the “colonial condition” inspired by her political conscience, motivating her to take action in the face of the circumstances of her time, a fact that makes her an unusual woman, not only in that specific era, but in any era that demands rejection of convention and conformism in the face of an unjust social order. Maria Eugénia was not a guerrilla fighter, nor a nurse, nor a political counselor to the nationalist movement.
I'll visit
10.03.2025 | by Aida Gomes
This letter from a father to his son, who nevertheless grew up with different references, shows this continuity (the son was lucky enough to see two terms of a Black president, an example to the African American community in terms of representation and ambition). United by fear and anger, they underpin the idea of an imagined community, since the Black body demolishes any theory or story of personal success (studies, money, status) as long as it’s marked by discrimination.
To read
27.02.2025 | by Marta Lança
A meeting with the authors of Tribuna Negra: Origens do Movimento Negro em Portugal (1911-1932), Cristina Roldão, José Pereira and Pedro Varela, resulted in this long conversation at BUALA.
The book presents a complex plot that neatly ties together the available information and many loose ends. As a research stance, the authors' interrogative formulation, acknowledging the limitations, leaves unanswered what we still don't know: “what have they said?”, “what have they done?”, it creates new questions and confirms how much research is yet to be done on Black Lisbon at the beginning of the 20th century. In fact, by reading the book, you get the feeling that each chapter could be another book.
Face to face
22.02.2025 | by Marta Lança
Walter Salles knows this perfectly well, being the third richest filmmaker in the world, ‘second’ only to George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, with inherited wealth of very controversial origin, bringing together Unibanco, the result of an expansion benefiting from the Brazilian dictatorship's policy of banking centralization, with metallurgy and mining that dominate 80% of the global metal market.
Afroscreen
13.02.2025 | by Gabriella Florenzano
After departing from Germany, they settled in Australia and began archiving their visual memories, which were eventually sent to Iwalewahaus. Their professional legacy has since been digitized and shared with the Centre of Black Culture and International Understanding (CBCIU) in Osogbo, Nigeria. Their collection has been researched in the frame of collaborative research projects and individual PhD topics, questioning Ulli and Georgina Beiers legacy and its inherent dominant narratives as well as contributing to a broader understanding of Modernisms. Currently, Iwalewahaus as an institution still feeds from its initial strategies, trying to navigate between different stakeholders and ethical commitment.
To read
11.10.2024 | by Katharina Greven
Material and bodily relations and interactions are of fundamental importance for framing cannibalism of the technologies of conquest and of ethnographic museums specifically. The museum instead is not seen as an institution but as part of the bigger continuum of conquest and it’s embodiment by the Western powers. The body is not seen as a monad, as a discrete and spatially limited category, but as a source, a force and an opportunity, as a site of otherness within oneself but also as limited by difference.
To read
27.09.2024 | by Ekaterina Golovko
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Portuguese Revolution and the centenary of the birth of one of the most influential leaders of the African decolonization movement. Transatlantically, Cuba played an important part militarily and politically in ejecting the colonizers, while Brazilian educator Paolo Freire was influenced by Cabral’s education for the people. Their ideas are very relevant today.
To read
10.09.2024 | by Graham Douglas
