Quintal collaborates with Documentaria – Documentary Film Festival, curating the section “Ethnographic Visions”. From 8 to 12 November 2021, five documentaries will be presented dedicated to the African countries of the Portuguese Official Language (PALOP): Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Principe and Guinea-Bissau. The films on Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé offer different points of view on the process of colonisation by the Portuguese regime, but also on the painful liberation struggles that made these countries independent between 1974 and 1975. The other two titles, on the other hand, document and represent the theme of migration, in the case of Cape Verde, through an original path that sees as its main subject the barrel and, in the case of Angola, the dialogue between tradition and modernity, a reflection on the concepts of culture and identity addressed through the work of the Contemporary Dance Company of Angola. A common thread links the documentaries, that is an evocative dimension, the theme of memory, developed and declined in its different aspects, individual and collective memory, a memory of the body, sensorial and migratory memories, constantly opening windows between past and present.
The films are the result of research carried out by anthropologists or by directors whose documentary approach reveals a strong ethnographic basis, a research cinema. The various directors skilfully combine documentary observation with the participation and representation of the subjects involved, a shrewd use of archive material of undoubted historical and anthropological relevance, without concealing the subjective point of view. Stories, in short, that deserve to be known.
