In his first film shot in exile, Glauber Rocha (1939–1981) builds a sort of epic and apocalyptic theatre to stage the struggle of people from the Third World against the forces of Western imperialism. In a mythical Africa that embodies the strongest and most violent contradictions of neo-colonialism, the revolutionaries train guerrillas to combat the agents of oppression. Shot in twenty-two days in 1969, during the transition to the People’s Republic of the Congo, the film signals the start of a transformation in Rocha’s filmmaking and gives concrete form to his search for a new political, tricontinental cinema, “a dangerous, cinema, divine and marvellous”, as he says in the Dziga Vertov group’s Wind from the East (Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin).
José Quental
