The Nights Still Smell Of Gunpowder
Inadelso Cossa / Mozambique, France, Germany, Portugal, Netherlands & Norway / 2024 / International Premiere / 93 min
A hypnotic film debut from Mozambique, where a young director visits his grandmother's village to measure the depths of her memories. Each moment is staged as a drama in itself in a dark and disquieting piece of cinema.
When an elderly person passes away, new pages disappear from the book of history. Memories are lost, and with them, the past slowly disappears. That is why young filmmaker Inadelso Cossa embarks on a journey back to his grandmother’s village to explore the haunting memories of the long and violent civil war that started in Mozambique after the country won its independence in 1975. The grandmother survived the cruel war that cost nearly a million lives, but now struggles to preserve her memories. She shares a village with a former rebel who is both perpetrator and victim in a film that never limits itself to merely recording and documenting. Drawing inspiration from filmmakers as diverse as Joshua Oppenheimer and Pedro Costa, but with a unique ability to activate the past on its own terms, each frame of Cossa’s debut film is expressively staged as a drama in itself.