Very good movie on the Angola civil war, a subject not often explored in film but full of possibilities as most wars are. But this is a different kind of movie as it uses animation to tell its story while also taking the Band of Brothers way of storytelling, by having the real people who were involved in it say in their own words what happened. It is mostly animation but with live action images scattered throughout, resulting in a very engaging experience. Technically I found the movie breathtakingly beautiful, using a style of animation that I don't particularly like but making the most out of it, creating some beautiful imagery and a realism that I wasn't expecting. Congratulations to the duo directing the movie, really well done. And now I must delve a bit on the political side of this movie. As a Portuguese this is a story that resonates a lot with us because it was a huge deal in our country, full of changes during that period of time. I must address another reviewer here that didn't like the way it made the MPLA look like saints, and he didn't like the movie because of it, he made a lot of valid points but I don't think this movie is as black and white as he makes it seem, sure it is told through the eyes of MPLA supporters, but there are a lot of clues to show that they were no saints, for example, when they are talking about the brother or comrade way of addressing a soldier, they say it's a coin flip and they both will kill you if you address them in the wrong manner, and by the end, the Artur character is extremely disappointed with the way the war turned out, where all their ideals and principals were never upheld, calling into question the whole war, which again shows that the MPLA were not very different from UNITA. And this brings me to our main character, Ryszard Kapuscinski. He was a very well known Polish journalist and writer and upon some research I found that he was not very consensual, as he often took real stories and romanticized them so much to the point of being total inventions. By adapting one of his works the filmmakers made an excellent decision of using the before mentioned technique of mixing animation, to tell the Kapuscinski story, and real live footage, to act as kind of a fact checker about what is being said. Highly recommended.
