THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
The hardness and thickness of the line, the strength of the graphics and the colors, the very tone of the voiceover leave little room for mystery. The story that will be told to us will be harsh. It is rooted in scorched lands on the surface of which the noise of rifles and the complaint of missing bodies still resonate. We are in Angola, a country devastated by twenty-six years of civil war, now at peace but plagued by social injustice, poverty, corruption and state control over institutions. A reality contrary to the utopian model of which the combatants had dreamed.
It is this story that embraces the first feature film by Portuguese director José Miguel Ribeiro, Nayola. Powerful film, both violent and poetic – we discovered it, in June 2022, in official competition at the Annecy Animation Film Festival –, which tells Angola from 1995 to 2011, through three generations of women, the grandmother, her daughter and his granddaughter. That is to say three eras which intertwine, revealing the different visions of a culture whose soul remains in the accents and the dialects, the movement given to the bodies, the spirits that the drawing allows to represent.
Inspired by a play (A Caixa preta, by José Eduardo Agualusa and Mia Couto), the film creates an epic tale whose narrative form enjoys playing with time, multiplying the round trips between the past and the present, which, according to more or less stretched sequences , respond to each other, and sometimes merge into an almost unreal evocation, offering a moment of eternity. The subject of memory, of the transmission of war trauma already occupied one of the short films by José Miguel Ribeiro (Fragments, 2016). This same theme serves, here, a long incandescent journey through the ages, from desolation to the vitality of a rebellious youth.
Crossing the country
The latter is embodied in a teenager named Yara, a little rapper (short hair, sassy spirit) living with her grandmother (Lelena) in the slums of Luanda. The girl knew her parents very little. Her father, Ekumbi, always fought on the front line, far from home, and her mother, Nayola, chose to leave home, two years after the birth of her daughter, to go in search of her husband, who was , one day, reported missing.
Yara therefore grew up with this fearful and bereaved grandmother for a long time, first by the death of her husband, killed by the Portuguese colonists, then by the loss of her daughter and her son-in-law. Conversely, the girl chose rebellion to survive these departures experienced as abandonment. She has fed an anger that makes her act, write, compose and sing subversive songs without being afraid of anything. Not even actions taken by the police to prevent the distribution of the audio cassettes that the young girl tries to refurcate here and there, in order to make her music known.
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