Set during the brutal 15 year civil war in Mozambique following its liberation from Portugal, this film opens with a boy wandering the countryside with a man he calls "uncle." They come across a recently burned out old bus with charred corpses inside, and take shelter. The sense of the horrifying reality they're in is quite apparent, and if this is a sleepwalking land, it must be an absolute nightmare. The boy finds a diary and begins reading about a young man who lost his family and then came across a woman in an abandoned ship missing her son, which sets in motion a parallel story.
All of these lives are fractured, having lost loved ones to atrocities and seemingly in an endless loop, much as the boy and man's wanderings always lead them back to the bus. There is danger all around, with roving, heavily armed gangs patrolling the roads, land mines in the brush, and people who've gone nuts, such as the guy who catches them in a net and then threatens to bury them.
With that said, director Teresa Prata exercises restraint in showing the violence, and the film really doesn't dwell on the grim reality of the war. Instead, it gradually injects bits of magical realism and tells an uplifting story of trying to look out for others, find family, and survive, all under devastating conditions, and all while dreaming of getting away or of the war ending. The stories ultimately bend together in a lovely, touching way.
Be forewarned though, there are some disturbing scenes involving children, and I don't just mean the kinds of violence or murder you might expect from a film set during the civil war. In one of them, a man nonchalantly wheels his daughter around strapped down in a backbreaking position over a barrel to "twist her body like a snake" so that she can "become famous." In another, the "uncle" to the pre-adolescent boy cheerfully masturbates him, and while I learned from a Prata interview afterwards that this is a depiction of a common initiation rite in Mozambique, it was more than a little repelling to me. I appreciated the honesty and learning something about another culture, but in reading up on these rites and the initiation camps they're ordinarily conducted in, it was tough to see this as joyful, as the film portrays it.
All of these lives are fractured, having lost loved ones to atrocities and seemingly in an endless loop, much as the boy and man's wanderings always lead them back to the bus. There is danger all around, with roving, heavily armed gangs patrolling the roads, land mines in the brush, and people who've gone nuts, such as the guy who catches them in a net and then threatens to bury them.
With that said, director Teresa Prata exercises restraint in showing the violence, and the film really doesn't dwell on the grim reality of the war. Instead, it gradually injects bits of magical realism and tells an uplifting story of trying to look out for others, find family, and survive, all under devastating conditions, and all while dreaming of getting away or of the war ending. The stories ultimately bend together in a lovely, touching way.
Be forewarned though, there are some disturbing scenes involving children, and I don't just mean the kinds of violence or murder you might expect from a film set during the civil war. In one of them, a man nonchalantly wheels his daughter around strapped down in a backbreaking position over a barrel to "twist her body like a snake" so that she can "become famous." In another, the "uncle" to the pre-adolescent boy cheerfully masturbates him, and while I learned from a Prata interview afterwards that this is a depiction of a common initiation rite in Mozambique, it was more than a little repelling to me. I appreciated the honesty and learning something about another culture, but in reading up on these rites and the initiation camps they're ordinarily conducted in, it was tough to see this as joyful, as the film portrays it.