Interview with Inês Gonçalves, conducted in St. Thomas and Principe in January 2014 within the frame of the project NEVIS- Narrativas Escritas e Visuais da Nação Pós-colonial. Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and St. Thomas and Principe (PTDC/CPC-ELT/4939/2012), directed by Dra. Ana Mafalda Leite and financed by FCT, Portugal. Inês Gonçalves is photographer, film director and producer. She launched the production company NO LAND Films, with Kiluanje Liberdade in 2005. As a photographer she has participated in a number of exhibitions and publications. Her filmography includes: Outros Bairros (1998), co-director with Kiluanje Liberdade and Vasco Pimentel; Pátria Incerta, (2005) co-director with Vasco Pimentel;Oxalá Cresçam Pitangas (2005/2006), photography director, directed by Kiluanje Liberdade and Ondjaki; Mãe Jú (2006/7) documentary/Installation, co-director with Kiluanje Liberdade; Luanda: A Fábrica da Música, (2008) co-director with Kiluanje Liberdade;Tchiloli: Máscaras e Mitos (2009), co-director with Kiluanje Liberdade; Na Terra Como no Céu (2010); A Minha Banda e Eu (2011); 25 Anos dos Direitos das Crianças São Tomé e Príncipe (2013); 11 SPOTS for Television and Radio on «Direitos das Crianças» (2014). She is also the author of a website dedicated to Tchiloli. https://tchiloli.com/.

In the context of the international production of a political cinema, engagé, Sarah Maldoror created and maintained – from Monangambé to Sambizanga, both on the anti-colonial struggle in Angola, through Des fusils pour Banta, filmed in the maquis of Guinea-Bissau – a singular practice. She composed a political cinema, served by an aesthetically careful look, and in which, through fictional elements – and not through the documentary options and the direct cinema feature then characteristic of militant cinema - the action is not as central as the psychological composition of the characters. Despite the aesthetic quality of her films and the psychological density of her characters, criticism and attempts to control her creative options marked the beginning of the cinematographic work of what is considered the first African women director but who still does not have the recognition won by her male peers.

This article makes a foray into the history of Luanda and its cinemas in the first half of the twentieth century. In general terms, it gives a great panorama of the history of the city and the then existing cinema, and then discusses the spatialization of cinemas, trying to understand how this spatialization reflected the existence of an increasingly divided and segregated city.

Between 1971 and 1982 a mythological character from the southern region of Angola marked the ethnography, literature and cinema produced in Angolan territory.The study of this character called Nambalisita aims to demonstrate the geographic, historical and temporal levels in which the character is situated, and to identify the structurally intact traits in their mythic symbology, and the variations that distinguish them in the forms as represented in the different languages adopted, especially in the period that marked the post-independence in Angola.

This paper aims to examine why and how (See HUTCHEON, 2013) Sarah Maldoror adapts Luandino’s writingto audiovisual language. For this purpose, it will be addressed topics such as the state of the art of intersemiotic translation studies and film adaptation; ideological correspondence between writer, filmmaker and the MPLA, and how this is reflected in their works; the agency of gender relations developed in both narratives; the amalgamation between man and nature and metaphors that takes in different languages; and finally the poetic language of Luandino Vieira as a strategy of resistance and the parallels found by the filmmaker in her adaptation.

In this article, we will reflect on the parodic recovery of paradigmatic text for the Angolan culture, Ngunga’s adventures, by the film Hollow city. We will compare the course of the protagonists, seeking approximations and divergences between such fictional elements. Then, from the theorizations about the parodic intertextual dialogue, we will study the meeting of the two textual materialities, a process we call the staging of reading. At this point, we will deal with the insertions of Ngunga’s adventures in Hollow city. We shall raise all the explicit references to the narrative text of Pepetela, brought to the dance by means of theatrical adaptation, seeking to explore possible meanings for such insertion, seen as ironic and parody.

The present work intends to establish a dialogue between the novel A geração da utopia by the Angolan author Pepetela and the film O herói directed by Zezé Gamboa. The dialogue between the two works will begin with the reading of a scene from the third part of Pepetela’s novel, entitled “O polvo (Abril de 1982)”, and a movement between two consecutive scenes from the feature film by Zezé Gamboa. Here, these scenes will be thought from a construction based on a cinematographic look, which seems to effect the critical present in its characters.

The present text intends to deal with three different moments of the route travelled by Mozambican cinema, placing them in its historical context and in its the subjective environment, trying to provide scholars with further information for a deeper understanding of the options that were made and the projects conceived.

This article presents an overview of cinema and audiovisual production in São Tomé and Príncipe, from the colonial period until the present. Adopting a transnational point of view, it addresses main productions related to the archipelago, both by São Tomean and foreign filmmakers.

We propose to analyse the documentary A guerra da água [The Water War] (1996) by Licinio Azevedo to reflect on the problem of water and rethink the role of women in this new war. In a similar way, the book Água. Uma novela rural [Water. A Rural Novella] (2016) by João Paulo Borges Coelho reproduces the problematic relationship between man, nature and technology. Thus, the purpose of this article is to deepen an intertextual reading of the two works to provide a new perspective on the issue of water in Mozambique.

The present paper analyzes two documentary films by Cape Verdean director Júlio Silão Tavares, Batuque, a alma de um povo (2006) and Eugénio Tavares – coração crioulo (2011). The article focuses on forms of participation of documentary cinema in the process of consolidation of national identity in Cape Verde and on the basic functions that this cinematographic genre could have in African countries.

The proposal of this article is interdisciplinary for it aggregates conceptual views that refer to the anthropological binarisms, to the construction of the narrative plot and to the history of the African people, in the analysis of the film Virgem Margarida by Licínio Azevedo. It is about the drama concerning a contingent of women imprisoned by a group of rulers and their allies, whose nation project is based on a conception of reason that overrides Mozambican popular myths and beliefs. In addition to narrating a fact very close to what happened in Mozambique’s independence process, the film focuses mainly on human suffering, connivance and hatred that jump from the sublime to the tragic, from the comic to the exalted between the women and their tormentors during the confinement in a large group.

The cinema of Guinea-Bissau is mainly known by two great figures, namely Flora Gomes and Sana na N’Hada. The text makes an introduction to the historical context and traces an evolution of cinema from independence. It summarizes the main thematic and aesthetic lines to approach, in the second part, two recent productions. The first feature films by filmmaker Filipe Henriques, O espinho da rosa, and João Viana, A batalha de Tabatô. These films indicate a transformation in the Guinean cinema that takes the way of a transnational cinema.

The documentary has shown a great capacity to contribute to the deep understanding of current issues or retaken under historical research perspectives. Over the years there have been numerous topics covered, analyzed or revealed through the documentary in Africa. As far as the Mozambican film experience is concerned, throughout history there has been a significant production of documentaries in the country, many of them important for the understanding of post-colonial and post-civil wars experience. One of the great names of this cinematography is Licínio Azevedo. It is proposed with this study to discuss the relationship between cinema, history and memory from the documentarist production of the filmmaker. The study and analysis of the films is centered in the sociohistorical perspective of filmic analysis. The first conclusions of this study show that the films of Licínio Azevedo offer to the spectator representative images of Mozambican spaces and socio-cultural practices, in a positive way, it is worth emphasizing, they deal with historical issues of the Mozambican context, still striking in local imaginary and daily life and provide different visions about being a Mozambican. In addition, the films also constitute a kind of collective visual memory of the country in the periods and spaces emphasized. The importance of the said and unsaid films can bring to the construction of a memory, be it collective or individual, become points of reference for any sociohistorical study, and also aesthetic, especially when this information, often forgotten or ignored, reveal distinct interpretations of history or official memory.

In Mozambique, as in many other parts of the world, cinema nowadays assumes configurations regarding genres and modes, dynamic and innovative, especially in the ethical and aesthetic perspective. Having as object of reflection A última prostituta and Virgem Margarida, both of Licínio de Azevedo, the article intends to discuss the boundaries between the documentary cinema and the one of fiction. In the light of cinematographic theories and practices, interdisciplinary and intertextual readings that link image, theories and practices of representation and of memory that allow to associate techniques and semantic effects, from structures that function as signs and values constructs of senses are approached. The reflection is fundamentally a call to reflections that take the objects - cinematographic works - as texts that are inserted in different contexts and that investigate the world, summoning plural and dynamic visions.

Working as a countercurrent to the imperial rhetoric around the patriarchal family and home, the literary trope of the orphan offers a critical view of the Portuguese colonial and postcolonial experience, emphasizing the anxieties and traumas that were felt in the context of the end of the Empire, the Decolonization process and the return of settlers and their descendants to Portugal. The experience between worlds (the Portuguese and the African), which characterizes the trajectory of the protagonist of O Tibete de África – a novel published by Margarida Paredes in 2006 – manifests itself in a state of double orphanhood stemming from her father’s death and subsequent disintegration of the family, as well as from the loss of her place of origin - Angola. This essay delves into this orphan journey, which has obvious symbolic repercussions.

The film The blue eyes by Yonta (Udju azul di Yonta - 1992) is the second fiction feature-length made by the Bissau-Guinean filmmaker Flora Gomes. The drama narrates the history of the different generations that lived colonial, postcolonial and neocolonial, through the lives of the characters Yonta, Zé, Vicente and Amilcarzinho, passing through the political, economic, social, artistic and cultural history of Guinea Bissau. Components of the soundtrack, the perspective of the future from the discourse /speech of the child Amilcarzinho, and Guinea-Bissau are highlighted for this article. For this purpose, critical texts on African cinemas, especially from Portuguese-speaking countries, are used as theoretical support, and interviews conducted by the filmmaker, that are listed in the references.