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 reality of Amílcar Cabral’s death began to invade my consciousness, surreptitiously and insidiously. The idea of killing comrade Cabral seemed surreal to me. I absurdly refused to believe that idea, but the incessant fighting everywhere brought me back to reality: the combatant’s anger at the death of his chief was expressed. In Conakry, at the PAIGC [African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde] General Secretariat, as soon as we arrived, our team of four filmmakers had a meeting with Amílcar Cabral’s widow, comrade Ana-Maria. She described to us the last journey she made with her husband before they returned home at night. The car they were traveling in was still at the scene of the tragedy, with a bullet hole in one of the doors. The brownish stain of Cabral’s blood stained the ground. Ana Maria told us that Amílcar Cabral absolutely refused to be tied up, with his hands on his back, and even more so to be taken to Bissau, as his murderers wanted. On the contrary, Amílcar Cabral vehemently insisted that they come with him to his office for a serious conversation. Even after he had been shot the first time, he still wanted to know what was going on and why. I no longer remember what happened to me that day, nor do I know how I got to Dakar. All I know is that, while still in Conakry, I declined the invitation to attend the trial of Amílcar Cabral’s murderers.

Sana na N’Hada interviewed by Marta Lança, “Buala”, 17 March 2025

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