The Night Still Smell of Gunpowder

Med en sanselig tilnærming til spøkelser og fiktive minner besøker filmskaperen Inadelso Cossa sin bestemors landsby i Mosambik. Ofre, gjerningsmenn, tidligere opprørskjempere og overlevende sivile bor her. Bestemor overlevde den brutale borgerkrigen som kostet nesten en million liv, men sliter nå med å bevare minnene sine. Gjennom mareritt, lyder, bortkomne bilder og et barns svart-hvitt-bilde i en haug med tørre blader, utforsker filmen – sakte og i fragmenter – minnet om borgerkrigen i Mosambik, som varte fra 1977 til 1992.

The film is from the start a sensorial experience. Sound and image prickle the skin and the mind, inviting viewers into an open, sensitive, and attentive mode of film watching.

Cineuropa - by Elena Lazic

***

Memories are lost, and with them, the past slowly disappears. A sensory approach to ghosts, to missing and fictitious memories.

In this mesmerising and hypnotic film set in Mozambique, a young director embarks on a journey to his grandmother's village, seeking to unveil and preserve his grandmother's fading memories of the long and violent civil war. Victims, perpetrators, former rebel fighters and surviving civilians live here. The grandmother survived the cruel civil war that cost nearly a million lives but now struggles to preserve her memories. Through the medium of nightmares, sounds, absent images and a child’s black-and-white photo in dry foliage, the film – slowly and in fragments – explores the memory of the civil war in Mozambique, which lasted from 1977 to 1992.