Catarina Laranjeiro, Daniel Barroca | Portugal, 2023, 118'
Unal is a village of rice producers whose inhabitants played a crucial role in Guinea-Bissau’s liberation struggle against Portuguese colonialism. They were the first to engage in the armed uprising, mobilizing their ancestral spirits, the Irãs - the natural land-owners to whom they pay reverence – into the guerilla. Still today, every gesture of the rice cycle – from plowing to harvesting – is haunted by memories of the war. A trauma that is also inscribed in their present-day rituals, bodies,landscapes, and techno music. In the war’s aftermath, a group of soldiers got possessed by a messianic vision, “The Shadow”, that gave them the power to foresee the future and heal their communities with bush plants through talismanic writings. “Fire in the Mud” takes a deeply immersive approach to a complex melting pot of religious forms and political turmoil within a diverse community, where veterans of the war live with restless youngsters, claiming their future in contemporary Guinea-Bissau.
Catarina Laranjeiro (1983) is a visual anthropologist holding a Ph.D. in Post-Colonialism and Global Citizenship. In the last ten years, she has researched the relationship between cinema and cosmological images during the liberation struggle in Guinea-Bissau, also part of her master thesis short film “Pabia di Aos” (2013). At the same time, she led and participated in several projects interlacing anthropology, cinema, and visual arts. Currently, she is conducting a six-year research project about vernacular film production in Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and their diasporas in Europe.
Daniel Barroca (1976) works in the intersection between fine arts, film and historical anthropology. His current Ph.D. research is focused on the afterlives of war images in Portugal and Guinea-Bissau. He is the author of expanded cinema installations like Soldier Playing with Dead Lizard (2008) and … a hazy and confusing landscape (2009). He was a resident artist at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam; Home Workspace Program, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut; and Open Sessions, The Drawing Center, New York.
