Movies & TV Shows from Guinea-Bissau

Proposes a speculative meeting between the Baron of Água Izé, the first nobleman in the Portuguese colonies of the 1800s who was of mixed European and African ancestry, and Maria Correia, the Black Princess of Príncipe Island in the 1700s. Reanimating them through the bodies of contemporary artists, the film uses dance, poetry and music to weave profound threads between the past and the present. Transcending space, time and language, their encounter wrestles with questions of culpability, power and the exploitation of both land and Black bodies.

Shaped by mysticism, resistance, and the voice of revolutionary leader Amílcar Cabral, we take a personal and poetic journey through the anti-colonial past and present of Guinea-Bissau.

A filmmaker follows the odyssey of an invisible missionary as he wanders between villages in Guinea-Bissau, trying to respond to the call by Amílcar Cabral, who wishes to hear the voice emanating from the heart of his people, and witnessing the country’s chaotic operational impasse, which is ultimately overcome by the people’s determination to succeed through hard work.

Recording a 24-hour period throughout every country in the world, we explore a greater diversity of perspectives than ever seen before on screen. We follow characters and events that evolve throughout the day, interspersed with expansive global montages that explore the progression of life from birth, to death, to birth again. In the end, despite unprecedented challenges and tragedies throughout the world, we are reminded that every day we are alive there is hope and a choice to see a better future together. Founded in 2008, it set out to explore our planet's identity and challenges in an attempt to answer the question: Who are we?

Guinea-Bissau, 1969. A violent war between the Portuguese colonial army and the guerrillas of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea. Nome leaves his village and joins the maquis. After years, he will return as a hero, but joy will soon give way to bitterness and cynicism.

The Mediateca Onshore in Malafo, a village in Guinea-Bissau, is an archive and a club for agropoetic practices. As Amílcar Cabral talks feminism on tape, the directors speak in the mangroves about the contradictions of depicting the community.

A beautiful, intelligent and flirtatious young girl, Yonta, is secretly in love with a friend of her parents, Vicente, a hero of the war of independence. Vicente is unaware of her passion as she is of the love of a young man who sends her anonymous love letters.

For the first time since they escaped the war in Guinea-Bissau, Eny, a painter living in Berlin, and his sister Titina, go on a journey through West Africa. After 17 years of exile and the passing of their mother, they are guided to the land of their ancestors.

"Conakry" is a homage to the Guinean-Bissauan and Cape Verdean anti-colonial leader Amílcar Cabral. This poetic film is a single shot 16mm film staged at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and based on the archival images. The film-maker Filipa César, invited the Portuguese writer and artist Grada Kilomba and the American radio activist Diana McCarty to reflect on the images and their history, questioning what these film archive mean in a post-African liberation world.

The story of a woman who searches through the country for her husband, a resistant, while the war for independence is raging. She finds him at last and saves his life. When peace finally arrives, they have to learn how to be together again and start living in a destroyed land.

A film about the incommunicability of two worlds.

Documentary on the assassinated liberation leader.

Nossa Terra is a combat film, an urgent film, shot during the guerilla warfare surrounding Guinea-Bissau’s struggle for independence in the mid-1960s. Before becoming a politically committed filmmaker, Mario Marret had been a resistance fighter, an anarchist activist, a radio operator, an explorator. Making his way in French anti-colonial activist circles, he moved closer to the PAIGC (the movement for independence in Guinea and Cape Verde), who was then interested in cinema as a combat tool. He will be the first director to join the struggle. “It was a testimony. Never mind the format, the camera, all these things, a filmmaker was present. The filmmaker must be at the place where the world is made, when it is made. (Mario Marret)”(Léa Morin)

In The Embassy, Filipa César takes an old album of colonial photos showing landscapes, people, architecture and monuments in Guinea-Bissau in the forties and fifties as a basis for thinking about the codes of representation of former Portuguese colonial power and the way memory is produced. Furthermore, these images are shown by a Guinean archivist who tells the story of his country seen through his own eyes.

The Portuguese colonial past is actualized through performance.

Ernania is hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital in Mozambique. She dreams about her little son, Hanic, and her husband, Pak, who is a soldier of the war. In the meantime, a quirky musical instrument plays: her own bed. Ernania’s musical virtuosity, attracts the attention of the hospital nurses. One day, her song is played in a radio program and Rosa, an evangelical priest of “Rádio Moçambique”, goes to the hospital to listen to Ernania’s song. Ernania takes the priest’s visit as an opportunity to run away from the hospital.

Filipa César, in her films and installations, explores the post-colonial constellations that were spawned by the recent history of Portugal. Since 2011, her research is focused on the film production in Guinea-Bissau, the beginnings of which were closely linked to the struggle for liberation. In February 2014, in Birbam, about three hours north of the capital Bissau, for the period of three weeks she has been documenting, together with the filmmaker Suleimane Biai, the construction of a house that will serve the surrounding villages as a meeting space. Alongside his work as a filmmaker, Suleimane Biai is the régulo in this region and hence has assumed the duties of the head and conciliator of the community.

This film documents the festivities and different stages of an initiation ritual of a Balanta community in Guinea Bissau. The filmmaker Sana na N'Hada, belonging to that same community, at the time of the film production was himself not initiated. Many years later Sana na N'Hada finally experiences the process through Fanado, what produced the acknowledgement of a personal conflict with his own film: the modernist ethnological look casted upon the events, articulated with his comments in the French language contrasts with the ungraspable, implicated in the opacity of those practices.

We went to research the conditions of the students in the guerrilla schools in the mangroves. Instead, we soon became ourselves the learners and the first lesson was how to walk. In the mangrove school the learning happens with the whole body.

Three colorful, sugarcoated kids trying to juggle school and save the world before bedtime.