The constant question of my cinema is collective memory. I live in a country that is constantly perpetrating an erasure of our history and our memory. My previous film also deals with memory exercises, the aftereffects of trauma, and how past events (like civil war) can emotionally and physically affect people’s lives, as well as how a generation deals with it. Do they remember or forget? Revenge or forgive, what if they never hear about it? How will they be able to defend themselves if history repeats itself?
I’m continually searching for a cinema that explores sensibility to the extreme, through images and sounds, to understand my cultural and social environment’s depths. That’s why memory is essential for my country and a vehicle for shaping people’s identities who still look for their reflection in the mirror. Making cinema is a mission and a cause to which I am entirely devoted and willing to risk everything—even challenge my country’s political system.
With cinema, I want to emancipate myself from the social conditions I grew up in, in a society that continues looking for foreign models to consolidate oneself. Mozambique needs cinema to return to its place of origin, face its ghosts. My country already lived the nightmare of colonialism and the Civil War, and their ghosts continue to haunt us. Exorcising, speaking, and producing cinema more articulated with its socio-cultural reality is urgent.
AS NOITES AINDA CHEIRAM A PÓLVORA (The Night Still Smells of Gunpowder) is about memory, its fragmented nature, and the need to document it when faced with the danger of losing it. The Mozambican Civil War ended in 1992, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and South African apartheid regime, which supported the fighting parties FRELIMO and RENAMO. As a result of the peace talks, RENAMO units were demobilized and integrated into the Mozambican military. One million people have been killed since 1977. A reconciliation process never took place. Today, tensions between RENAMO and FRELIMO have begun to flare again.
The Civil War was always a kind of fiction, a tale my grandmother created for me
My memories of the Civil War are linked to my childhood summer vacations in the village of my grandmother Maria. They are peaceful memories, but the surprising fact is that they happened during a war, and I never noticed. How was it possible? As a child, I often spent time at my grandparent’s place in their village. One night we were attacked by the rebels. My grandmother carried me on her back while running away. When I asked her what those lights were, she told me they were fireworks. The Civil War was always a kind of fiction, a tale my grandmother created for me. My generation grew up with a taboo of talking about the war.
My false memory with my grandmother motivated me today to make this film. I needed to assemble the pieces of the fragmented memories I grew up with, the tales, the fiction. From that imaginary memory, I wanted to document the real story behind the Mozambique Civil War’s traumas: the fears, the stolen dreams, the experiences of people who suffered this horrible war in their own skins, and who lost relatives, belonging, homes, and loved ones.
But the fiction which my grandmother fed me leaves space to invent my memory through the images and sounds of cinema. After all, cinema is also a false memory, projected through the frame, juxtaposed alongside several layers of lies to produce an absolute truth. And as memory is constructed and linked strongly to the senses, like the smell of gunpowder triggers my false memory, the film wants to make the search for the lost and suppressed memories of the Civil War sensorily experienceable.
So, I go back to my grandmother’s village with the tools of cinema to make sense. But Maria has early stages of Alzheimer’s, and she no longer remembers the traumatic past. During the day she is occupied with her everyday duties, and her memories are fragmented. But at night, her memories are more precise, and she starts talking about her husband, and how a landmine killed him.
Because those nights don’t belong only to my grandmother, but to an entire village, this personal dialogue between my grandmother and I is the starting point for meetings with other characters, who are also essential parts of my childhood memories. They are witnesses, ex-rebels, victims who still dwell at night around a campfire, not to tell stories or fables anymore, but to re-tell and hear their own, to cure themselves from war ghosts, fears, and traumas. It is a therapy where the victims, perpetrators, and younger generation also participate, so they are unable to forget their past, and can walk in a safe future.
This film allows me to question the limits of cinema itself and the extent to which it can express different sensory sensitivities, like smells and touch.
Making this film, AS NOITES AINDA CHEIRAM A PÓLVORA, is a big challenge due to the chosen sensorial approach to telling this story: starting with the night and the smells it carries to provoke these Civil War memories. I had to deconstruct everything I knew about cinema and memory to venture on a new path, where cinema was at my story’s service and not the other way around.
This film allows me to question the limits of cinema itself and the extent to which it can express different sensory sensitivities, like smells and touch. For capturing the nights of the fairy tales that my grandmother told me, it is not enough to have a lens with a fast aperture. I had to return to the source of these stories, the warm lap of my grandmother Maria. To listen and elaborate the visual image of those lost fairy tales and tell my own with cinema. I believe in a personal cinema capable of capturing the flash of fireflies and the crabbing song of crickets in nocturnal harmony.
Success with this film means I fulfill my duty of memory-making, the mission of documenting a country that needs cinema to heal its traumas. The biggest challenge is to find the missing image and return it to my country. I want to hear my voice in cinema, to visualize my dreams and confabulate with these images, to narrate fantastic or imaginary stories as if they were real. In a personal, innovative, and urgent way, I want to enable all the aesthetic and creative possibilities of documentary filmmaking.
Making this film extends beyond the need to satisfy my ambitions as an artist and director. I must recover the memory and undergo emotional therapy to answer questions about Mozambique’s Civil War. By positioning myself personally, I want to find ways to open a collective and cinematographic dialogue about the traumas of the 16 years of war. There is still no image of the conflict in Mozambique, just as there is no open dialogue. And due to this silence, the horrors of the war still haunt my generation.
To capture my grandmother’s fairytales and the village’s nights and rendering them universal seems the way to make a film that contributes to open a dialogue between victims and perpetrators of the Civil War in Mozambique. The village’s story becomes a small example of the possibility of reconciliation and forgiveness, here and elsewhere.
Inadelso Cossa
