The torment of Angola’s civil war, which finally ended less than a year ago, is at the heart of a feature film currently being made in the capital Luanda to give new life to a long-dead industry.
Uma Cidade Vazia (The Empty City) tells of an orphaned boy, Ndala, who gets trapped in fighting between government troops and rebels for the central Angolan town of Kuito, which in the 1990s saw some of the fiercest clashes of the war.
Ndala gets help from a Roman Catholic nun, who takes him to Luanda, but the boy’s arrival in the coastal city brings no end to his troubles and the fear that grips him each time he hears gunfire.
”This tragic film is a way of portraying on screen the spiritual emptiness that installed itself in the country during the war,” its Angolan director Maria Joao said.
One of the movie’s producers, Frenchman Francois Gonot, believes that when The Empty City is released it will change the image of Angola abroad and give a boost to the lethargic cinema industry.
”For 20 years, Angola produced almost nothing,” said Gonot. The conflict between the formerly Marxist government and rebels of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita) lasted for 27 years.
Before the war, which was already under way when Angola gained independence from Portugal in 1975, the film business in the southern African country had been dominated by the colonial power. The first two films considered indigenous Angolan work were the 1971 short movie Monangambe and the feature-length Sambizanga, released in 1972, both directed by Sarah Maldoro, a Frenchwoman from Guadeloupe.
Based on novels by Angolan writer Luandino Vieira, they probed the relationship between the people of the country and the Portuguese colonists.
After that, conflict largely killed off the cinema industry, until the government, the national petroleum company Sonangol, mining firms, the African Investment Bank and the European Union joined forces to finance The Empty City.
Portuguese actress Ana Bustorff, who plays the part of the nun, said that ”it was the human sensitivity that seduced me in this script”.
Filming began in and around Luanda on January 7 and is scheduled to end on February 28, with the leading actor chosen from among 1 000 school students in the capital.
With a budget of just one-million dollars, shooting on location in Kuito, 700 kilometres from Launda, proved impossible.
Gonot regretted this, but said ”production costs are high and Angola is an expensive country”. – Sapa-AFP