“Our tears aren’t being seen because they’re not blue.”
Interview
“Our tears aren’t being seen because they’re not blue.”
Mortu Nega (1988)
Interview
BY
Ela bittencourt
An interview with director Flora Gomes, whose films Mortu Nega and The Blue Eyes of Yonta are streaming Metrograph At Home. Gomes features in Filipa César’s Spell Reel, which also streams through June 24.
Few filmmakers may lay the claim of having registered their country’s birth. This is the case of Flora Gomes, Guinea-Bissau’s preeminent director, whose camera captured the years of his country’s liberation and formation as a modern state, after a decade-long war of independence against the Portuguese (1963-1974). Though Gomes’s early movies are dedicated to the legacy of Guinea-Bissau’s revolutionary leader Amílcar Cabral, they refrain from the heroics of war epics. Gomes often says that cinema is rhythm, music, and above all, light. His enormous sensitivity to social nuance and his tempered optimism fill in the chiaroscuros of the everyday.
Gomes’s first feature, Mortu Nega (1988), offsets revolutionary fervor with the agony of Diminga, a woman who goes searching for her husband—only to have to part from him again, returning to her village to work the fields facing a drought. Rain comes, and yet, the sweetness of its patter meets bitterness, as Diminga witnesses the first fissures in collective solidarity. In Gomes’s second feature, The Blue Eyes of Yonta (1992), a young woman is torn between a disenchanted fighter-cum-businessman and a sentimental youth. In the dreamy final sequence, set around an azure, gleaming swimming pool, Gomes reveals the full breadth of his prodigious cosmopolitanism, as modernity hinges on both fantasy and disillusion.
I called in to speak with the 72-year-old Gomes, in Bissau, via Google Meets.
YOU BECAME A FILMMAKER DURING GUINEA-BISSAU’S WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE. I UNDERSTAND THAT YOUR EARLIEST WORK WAS IN JOURNALISTIC REPORTAGE?
I started out at a very difficult time. First, I come from Cadique, a tiny village in Guinea-Bissau, where some of the great battles in the revolutionary war took place. The war began when I was an adolescent. My family then moved 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]! (Laughs.)
My original desire was actually to study and teach physical education. But Cabral wanted to document the formation of our country. 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, Cabral wanted 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 the Portuguese rule. When Guinea-Bissau became independent, I accompanied Luís Cabral [Amílcar’s brother] in his official duties as President. Cinema essentially gave me the visa to travel wherever I wanted to go.
AMÍLCAR CABRAL CLEARLY SAW CINEMA AS A REVOLUTIONARY TOOL.
He had a clear vision of what cinema could do. We inherited a country with a very high level of illiteracy. 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. I don’t know of another country whose revolutionary struggle was as brilliant as ours that, at such an early stage, conceived of cinema with such enormous ambition Cabral could have invested in arms but he gave us cameras instead. I see him as our first filmmaker. My greatest regret is that he never lived to see if I truly answered the calling he gave me.
CUBA PLAYED A BIG ROLE IN THE HISTORY OF LEFTIST CINEMAS WITH FILMMAKERS SUCH AS BRAZIL’S GLAUBER ROCHA. WHAT WAS IT LIKE TO STUDY AT ICAIC?
When we were in Cuba, it was not the same formal school, but an understanding between Party members that we should study film. I recall that we had to improvise a projection room. But we studied with one of the greatest Latin American documentary filmmakers, Santiago Álvarez. I saw Rocha in Havana when he was presenting his film The Lion Has Seven Heads (1970). The room was completely packed! It was so full that I sat on the floor. At the time, my objective was simply to film and to learn theory, camerawork, and lighting principles. I never imagined how far we’d have to walk once in Guinea-Bissau. We were always on the move in the forest, marching for more than 12 hours a day. I was actually in the jungle when Cabral was assassinated [in 1973]. We walked seven days to [reach] the border.
In Cuba, all our professors knew that we had been entrusted with a great responsibility. Before us, not a single professional cameraman had accompanied [our] war of independence. Cabral and his brother had taken all the images. But Cabral then convinced many people to join him. I remember all the cameramen from other nations—the Dutch, the Swedes, the Italians, and the Cubans who wanted to tell our story. To this day, we don’t know how Cabral convinced the Soviets to give us arms, or the Cubans to teach us cinema. I don’t know of any other man with his level of education who had the foresight to leave everything he had, and to regress to the jungle—not because he wanted to make wars, but because he wanted to make his own life. Only later, in Cuba, did I recognize other fighters of his caliber, such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, but each of these men is his own case.
Mortu Nega (1988)
“I carry such details with me. They’re tiny droplets of my homeland.”
SOME OF THIS INCREDIBLE HISTORY IS CAPTURED IN FILIPA CÉSAR’S DOCUMENTARY FILM SPELL REEL (2017). IT’S BASED ON RARE ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE, INCLUDING YOUR OWN, WHICH TOOK DECADES TO COME TO LIFE, AND TO BE RESTORED AND DIGITIZED.
It’s very important to speak about this process of recuperation of our history. César came to Guinea-Bissau and also got in contact with Chris Marker, who was our great teacher. Marker, a man of enormous intelligence, showed us how to make cinema—and how not to make it, because, after all, you can only edit what you have filmed. César saw that many of our archival films were in a terrible state, deteriorating, and she found the funding to get these archive prints the restoration they merited. She has become part of our collective memory in Guinea-Bissau, as has Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video [the Berlin institute who funded the restoration work]. It was an excellent collaboration.
MORTU NEGA IS SOMETIMES DESCRIBED AS DOCUFICTION. IS THIS HOW YOU THINK OF IT?
I don’t know what I’d call it. When the film was ready, my editor Anita Fernandez showed it to Chris Marker. I wanted to know what Marker expected of it, but he said that he didn’t expect anything, just that I make a movie. The viewer can decide the rest. The film’s no longer mine.
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 was part of the colony. She 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, but we haven’t noticed. 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. Which is to say, our struggle, between life and death, is constant. To me, Bia Gomes, the actress who played Diminga, is one of the greatest actresses of our time. I’d like to use this moment to pay homage to her. She no longer lives in Guinea-Bissau but I hope she’ll someday read this.
YOU WERE ONCE ASKED IN AN INTERVIEW HOW YOU UNDERSTOOD POSTCOLONIAL CINEMA. YOU SAID THAT IT MEANT LOOKING TO THE FUTURE “THE FUTURE THAT, SOMEDAY, MIGHT BE AS FULL OF LAUGHTER AS A CHILD THAT’S BEING CARRIED ON HIS MOTHER’S BACK.” I CAN’T GET THIS IMAGE OUT OF MY HEAD, ESPECIALLY IN RELATION TO DIMINGA.
I spoke about a child on a mother’s back, because my own mother carried me on hers with so much love. She carried me for such great distances, despite enormous difficulties, and always encouraged me to study. She had never seen a movie in her life. She once asked me what I had decided to do professionally, and I told her that I chose to be like the vultures—I’d be wherever blood was being spilled. Not to kill, but rather to bear witness to Cabral’s greatness.
Speaking of postcolonial cinema, I don’t believe we’re there yet. It seems to me that Africa is still living colonialism. It’s becoming more and more isolated. How many of our people die each day? In the ships. In the ocean. Our tears aren’t being seen because they’re not blue. We must invent our manner of crying, and cry so much that the tears of our mothers, sons, and daughters are finally seen.
The Blue Eyes of Yonta (1992)
IS THIS THE IDEA YOU WANTED YOUR VIEWERS TO GET FROM YOUR SECOND FEATURE, THE BLUE EYES OF YONTA?
The Blues Eyes of Yonta is about the conflict between the revolutionary generation and the one that came of age in the 1990s. The young also struggle, but they don’t want to be imprisoned by our ideals; they want to live their lives.
I recall when France’s President Mitterrand said that France was severing all cooperation with us, because a country such as Guinea-Bissau would never have the conditions to be a democracy. Africa has become democratic, but democracy is a European, Western experience. In our encounter with the European civilization, we haven’t yet found a way to govern our country. As I show in my film, we copied European modernism. The copy was so pervasive that even the young student who speaks of democracy ends up copying a love poem that talks about a young woman’s blue eyes. We copied our tragedies in a similar manner; we started to use big-cylinder cars without having built roads. We constructed houses that had nothing to do with our culture. We now must ask ourselves how we can create a democracy that makes sense in our own context.
This will be the task for the future generations. They’ll have to re-invent how to govern a country like Guinea-Bissau, which counts some 20, 30 ethnic groups, each with its own language, and which votes for the constituency it knows best. The revolutionary struggle in many ways broke with ethnic identification but it has resurged. Today, we struggle with the idea of identity.
In the movie, there is a scene with car tires, where each tire has a historical date [written on it]: for instance, the year of independence, the state proclamation, the first coup after the war, and so on, until 2000. For 2000, there is a question [written on the tire]: what will be the future of Guinea-Bissau? I’m not saying I was prophetic, but around 2000, in 1998, specifically, the great tragedy of Guinea-Bissau took place; we had a civil war, in which tactics were used that you would have never seen in the revolutionary war.
HOW DID YOU COME TO WORK WITH MAYSA MARTA, WHO PLAYS YONTA?
We didn’t have theaters or cinemas in Guinea-Bissau so everything was as new as our flag. When I filmed Mortu Nega, I fell in love with the young people who worked with me. Then I saw Maysa coming out of her parents’ house one day. I walked up to her in the square and said I’d fallen in love with her! (Laughs.) I asked to visit her parents, which made her shy. As she became more at ease, we got to work. I began to think about her relationships with her friends and parents. Later, Maysa went to the Cannes Film Festival [in 1992]. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a big marketing machine to promote the movie, which meant that it was less understood—especially because my dialogue is suggestive and open-ended. My films are about the characters’ visions and about the sonority of our world. For instance, I think of the young men [making the movie with me] in the forest, living for months without enough water or books. Yet, in our modesty, we had desire and grandiosity. It was a question of dignity. I’m truly proud to have worked with so many talented young people who gave the film all they had.
DESIRE AND HARDSHIP IS ALSO WHAT DRIVES THE YOUNG STUDENT WHO COPIES THE POEM THAT HE DEDICATES TO YONTA. HE SAYS THAT THE BAGS WHICH HE MUST CARRY AT THE PORT ARE STILL AS HEAVY AS THEY WERE UNDER THE COLONIZERS.
It’s very interesting. We were part of this historic moment and somehow thought that, after the independence, the kilograms would become lighter. On the contrary, we slowly realized that independence didn’t arrive when we said, “We’re free.” Independence required that we recognize the complexity of things. Our children will never know what it was like to become an adult with as many difficulties as we faced. We had no [sophisticated] machines to make us efficient, and yet we produced men like Cabral, one of this continent’s greatest.
The Blue Eyes of Yonta (1992)
I WAS WONDERING ABOUT YONTA’S BELT. IT HAS A GIANT WATCH ON IT INSTEAD OF A BUCKLE. HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH THIS STRIKING ELEMENT?
I’ll reveal my great secret! When I was in Canada, I went out to dinner one night and saw a clock on the wall that had stopped. Somehow this image stuck with me, though it’s not in my screenplay. I never put such details in my scripts. I’m one of those directors who, like a painter, leaves the fine touches for last to “touch up” the image. It’s like being a painter who’s not very confident, and knows that he must leave a hint, or a taste, to intrigue his viewers.
IT'S SUCH A FREEING GESTURE, IT BRINGS IN A FANTASTICAL ELEMENT. THERE’S ALSO ANOTHER SCENE, IN WHICH THE REVOLUTIONARY HERO, VICENTE, SEES A LANDSCAPE WITH VULTURES, THAT CLEARLY READS LIKES A VISION.
It’s a vision of the Inferno, another dimension, almost. The film material got overexposed. Yonta was only my second film. I knew that I would end up making many mistakes, but I needed to be daring. It’s like Yonta says to Vicente: “I respect your ideas, but you have to respect mine.” Of course, my films are political—I’m immersed in politics—but to me, the birds are also about freedom. We’re all free like vultures in flight. Yonta is about the beginnings of a new system, about the way in which democracy entered our lives—which is not to say that a one-party system was preferrable; there was a lot of violent opposition to it, and the film is, in a way, a form of autocritique, though I never held a political post. But that’s not my main point. With Yonta, I entered the realm of Surrealism. I’m a great admirer of Fellini and Italian cinema.
“I still have stories to tell and the courage to tell them”
SURREALISM HAD QUITE A POLITICAL RENAISSANCE IN GLOBAL CINEMAS STARTING WITH THE 1960s ALL THE WAY THROUGH TO THE ’90s. FOR INSTANCE, TOUKI BOUKI (1973).
AND, OF COURSE, IT MAKES SENSE THAT THE WATCH IS SURREALIST—IT’S DALÍ.
It’s time. But the watch also carries symbolism that’s uniquely ours. When a person in Africa makes an appointment for 5pm, he leaves the house at 5pm. It’s very typical of us. I carry such details with me. They’re tiny droplets of my homeland. I love still making cinema in the midst of all this madness that’s [truly] mine! Because my watch hasn’t stopped yet.
WHY DID YONTA’S?
It stopped at the pool. Because time must pick up again.
WE SPOKE ABOUT THE TIRES AND WHAT COMES NEXT. WHAT’S NEXT FOR YONTA?
Yonta is the generation of the 21st century that’s not as “stopped,” or paralyzed, as the generation before it, but instead is much more dynamic. At the same time, her generation hasn’t yet embraced the legacy that Cabral left them. The bridge between these generations hasn’t yet been built. The new generation have different priorities. They didn’t receive the same education in patriotism we did. They all want to leave. A young person with a doctorate would rather work as a manual worker abroad than a qualified worker at home. That’s our enormous dilemma, and our democracies haven’t yet resolved it, which makes our current world even harder. I think of the many days I can’t sleep seeing the women who carry the sick by the door of my house. I think of those who have lost their loved ones. It’s what makes me so proud of being African. I am immersed in this world. The person who helps me survive is my wife, because what I do doesn’t bring in enough money for me to support myself. As you can see, I’m using my friend’s internet. In our country, only young people make it possible [for me] to make cinema. There is no cinematographic policy or a national film institute. I’ve been searching for over 10 years for a producer to finance a documentary about Cabral. But I’ll never throw in the towel. On the contrary, I’m more determined than ever. I still have stories to tell and the courage to tell them—with big trees all around me whose branches are like my arms.
The rest is history, the history we all carry on our backs.
Ela Bittencourt is a writer and critic based in Sao Paulo and New York. Her essays have appeared in Artforum, Criterion, the New York Review of Books, and many other publications.
Spell Reel (2017)
