Amilcar

This beautifully made film about poet, agricultural engineer, and revolutionary Amílcar Cabral, who was born in Guinea-Bissau to Cape Verdean parents, takes an impressionist approach to its subject’s life and work. Using Cabral’s written words—including his poetry, letters, and political pamphlets—to tell his story (evocatively voiced by Cape Verdean filmmaker Nuno Miranda), the film dispenses with conventional narrative, adopting a more fragmented perspective. Shot on 16mm film, the poetic nature of Cabril’s words is harshly counterposed with the brute force of the official police reports, while archive footage blends with poetic images of nature, gradually building up an image of a man and the anti-colonial movement that he spearheaded, both in Portuguese Africa and beyond. As the personal and the political intertwine, Amilcar becomes both a portrait of a revolutionary and an exercise in forensics, as long-buried injustices are revealed.