This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the FEPACI and UNESCO – in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna – to help locate, restore and disseminate African cinema. The war began when I was an adolescent. My family moved from Cadique to another region, and it was there that I met Amílcar Cabral. I was expecting to see a tall man and indeed encountered a giant! Cabral wanted to document the birth of our country, so he sent a group of us to Cuba, to study at Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC), with this purpose. When I returned, he asked us to document the life in the liberated regions – the war, but also the daily lives of people in the countryside, and what life was like under Portuguese rule. He had a clear vision of what cinema could do. We inherited a country with a very high level of illiteracy, and that’s why Cabral wanted us to depict life in images, not words. His aim wasn’t to merely free Cape Verde or Guinea-Bissau, it was to liberate us from fear and ignorance: he could have invested in arms but he gave us cameras instead. In a way, I consider him our first filmmaker… When the film was ready, we showed it to Chris Marker, who was not just a man of enormous intelligence but also one of our masters … I tried to tell so many stories with this film! It’s like condensing a discourse of hundreds of pages into seconds. Mortu Nega is a story of a woman who chooses to join the struggle, because she herself wants to be free – and there’s nothing in this world like wanting to be free. But she also yearns for her husband. She searches for him for months, years. The story’s as intimate as the scent of tobacco. In the film, Diminga carries tobacco with her instead of food, because there are so many people, she could never feed them all. But she can carry and share the tobacco. It was important that the film be about such small details. The story ends when it becomes clear that Cabral is dead; everything he built has been dismantled. Diminga, who has lost everything, returns to her village determined to cultivate the land. It may seem that the struggle is over, but it isn’t.

The vultures circulate everywhere. Flora Gomes, excerpt from an interview by Ela Bittencourt,“Metrograph”, June 2022