At #136, we have a movie about the Angolan War of Independence. Or rather, about the events leading up to it; February 4th, 1961 is when that revolution kicked off, and this is set a few weeks earlier.

It’s a commonplace to observe that all art is political, but this is super political — it was made in 1972 during that war for independence (which wouldn’t end until a coup in Portugal in 1974), and one of the writers of the movie, Mário Pinto de Andrade, was one of the early leaders of an independence movement. He was also the longtime partner of director Sarah Maldoror, who was herself born in France and seems to have lived all over the place (so while this is an African film made by a woman, it’s not a film made by an African woman).

The story follows a family, which it shows first in happy times. He’s working his truck driver job at a quarry, she’s home with a baby. And then, suddenly, he’s abducted by the police in the night. The woman is obviously distraught about this, and the women in their neighborhood tell her to go to the prison with the baby and cry to speak to him.

(This is another one where even though the movie is a half century old, it only got a big restoration in 2022 — part of Criterion’s post-2020 effort to foreground works by Black artists — so I’ll spoiler protect it.)

Spoilers

So she sets off, walking at some length to the nearby town where she’s informed that no, he’s not being kept here, he’s in Luanda (the capital city), so she gets on a bus and sets off on that journey.

The movie intercuts between three groups: The woman, as she goes to various official buildings looking for him and being rebuffed (and going to her… friends? family?… and getting support); the man, as his prison stay gets progressively rougher as they begin to beat him more aggressively; and a group of proto-revolutionaries, who are trying to figure out who got captured by the police, and whether he’s going to turn on them.

Ultimately, all three strands come together when the man is beaten to death (without giving out any names); everyone mourns him, and the leader of the revolutionary group announces a plan to free all the prisoners on February 4th — an act which would of course have huge repercussions.

The surprising-to-me thing about the movie is that as the movie goes on, it becomes clear that the guy isn’t just a rando grabbed by mistake, he is leading a small revolutionary cell. Which I think speaks to the political purpose of the movie: If you were trying to make anti-colonial agitprop, having him be innocent would more effectively show the regime’s brutality, which is what I was expecting; but during a war, you want to play up the tragedy of the martyrs of the revolution, and having him die a hero in a noble fight for independence is a lot more meaningful than if he was just some guy.

But while I talked a lot about the political side of the movie, the movie foregrounds equally the domestic side. We see a lot of their family life together before he’s taken, and even afterward, we see a lot of scenes of comfortable domesticity and familial support among various characters. Even as she’s telling a story of colonial oppression, Maldoror makes this a very human story showing small moments of community and happiness in the characters’ lives. (It’s notable that even the last scene of the movie takes place at a dance party.) This could have been a simple polemic, and it’s not.