Weapons, Barons, New Men (Silawa, Mabwana, na Vijana)
Documentary, 16´, DV-CAM, Argentina, 2006
Synopsis: Raquel, a Portuguese student of documentary in Buenos Aires, reinterprets the colonialist past of her grandparents in Mozambique through the appropriation, edition and manipulation of Super 8 footage, recorded by her grandfather, José Manuel, an ex-colonialist administrator. Raquel scrutinizes the images to extract from them the signs of the colonial war, engraved in the placid quotidian of a typical colonialist family. Thirty years after Mozambique’s independence and the sudden departure of her family from the country, Raquel, living in Buenos Aires, understood as a symbolic substitute of Mozambique, tries to reconstruct the unlived familiar history, key for her own personal narrative. Signs that announce Raquel’s imminent departure from Argentina, the loss of a territory and also the separation from her boyfriend, reappeared in Raquel’s quotidian, as thirty years before in the domestic images of her family. Increasingly, the narrative opens itself to a new temporal dimension, which reconciles Raquel’s familiar past and her present, unifying both in the same narrative plan, animated by the mythological time of the Portuguese national epopee – Os Lusíadas. Raquel’s images invade and colonize the representative space (and the apparatus) of her grandfather’s images.
TECHNICAL DATA
Direction and Screenplay: Raquel Schefer
Production: Universidad del Cine de Buenos Aires
Archive images: José Manuel Monteiro
Photography: Jorge Flores Velasco, Raquel Schefer
Edition and sound design: Jorge Flores Velasco
Sound record: Raquel Schefer, Jorge Flores Velasco
Text and voice-over: Raquel Schefer