New animated feature weaves the director’s own trauma as the child of a Portuguese Colonial War veteran into a story of three generations of Angolan women living through a civil war that lasted 25 years.
Growing up in a free country doesn’t guarantee freedom from the effects of war. In fact, Portuguese director José Miguel Ribeiro says he’s proof that the “virus of war,” as he calls it, lasts for generations.
“My father was in the military,” explains Ribeiro. “He was in the Guinea-Bissau War of Independence during the Portuguese Colonial War. And, growing up at his side, I saw how that war influenced his behavior, how it affected him, and how it affected me, my mother, and my sisters. It changed our family forever.”
Ribeiro, whose life experiences have inspired him to create films like Fragments, a 2016 animated short about a man whose own aggressive behavior in a traffic jam sparks reflection on how his father’s war trauma spread to his son. Ribeiro’s most recent film, Nayola, also explores the generational effects of war. The film, which won the award for Best Feature Film at the Manchester Animation Festival, is Ribeiro’s first animated feature and will open the 42nd edition of Anima, the Brussels International Animation Film Festival, on Friday, February 17.
“These are personal stories for me,” he says. “My father is a very friendly guy, normally. He’s the kind of guy who, if he's in the street and someone walks by, he starts to talk to them. But when there is a tense moment, and something really upsets him, then he transforms. And I saw that when I was a kid and eventually, I realized it was not my father. He had become another person and I was trying to understand, ‘Who is that person? Because it's not the same father I know.’ I deeply understood the line that Nayola says at the end of the film, ‘No one comes back from the war.’”
Directed by Ribeiro and based on the play A Caixa Preta by Mia Couto and José Eduardo Agualusa, Nayola follows three generations of Angolan women in a civil war that has lasted for 25 years: grandmother Lelena (Vitória Adelino Dias Soares), daughter Nayola (Elisângela Rita) and granddaughter Yara (Feliciana Délcia Guia). Lelena lost her husband during the War of Independence and raised the now aspiring activist rapper Yara after Nayola left in search of her husband who went missing in action during the civil war.
Past and present intertwine in this story, which spans the years 1995 - 2011. The film details Nayola’s journey across war-ravaged Angola while also showing Yara, eight years after the war ended, who has become a rebellious teenager, determined to make the country a better place for the next generation while also hoping her presumed dead mother and father will return to her.
“For me, the war became something very central in my perception of the world and this was a story that interested me because it also obliged me to take the point of view of women,” explains Ribeiro. “I have two girls. They are now 20 years old, but even when they were younger, I was close to them. And, as I watched them grow, I was interested in their perspective about the world. So, this film provided a chance to explore that curiosity further and also find some answers to my own experiences growing up as a child of a war veteran who, like Yara’s parents, never really came back from the war.”
The 13-year-long colonial war – also known as the Angolan, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambican War of Independence – was fought from 1961 through 1974 between Portugal and the emerging nationalist movements in Portugal's African colonies. Out of Portugal’s population of over 10 million, roughly one million served in the military and fought in the war.
“So almost everybody here has an uncle, a father, or someone in the family that has been to war,” notes Ribeiro. “And yet, no one ever talks about it.”
The Portuguese regime at the time of the war, the Estado Novo, was overthrown by a military coup in 1974 and ended not only decades of dictatorship, but also brought the war to an end. But Portugal’s former colonies faced severe problems after independence. Devastating civil wars followed in Angola and Mozambique, which lasted several decades, claimed millions of lives, and resulted in large numbers of displaced refugees.
“Nobody wanted to talk about that period of Portugal’s history because we had done a lot of bad things in Angola and Mozambique,” explains Ribeiro. “The colonial war is connected with the exploitation of persons and lots of bad behavior. People wanted to think about a new country. They wanted to build democracy and freedom for the new generations, and people didn't want to talk about the past. So, these soldiers were, in a way, forgotten.”
This meant that 10 percent of Portugal’s population was silenced, psychologically unsupported, and unable to communicate their feelings and experiences regarding their time at war. As a result, Ribeiro says many families in Portugal began to experience post-war stress.
“Nobody gave them support and a lot of these people completely lost their families,” he shares. “When my father came back from war, my mother, at first, always tried to keep things calm and controlled. But there was a moment, when my father started to be less aggressive, that my mother became more aggressive. Now, I know about post-traumatic stress from war. I read a lot about it, including an investigation by a psychologist here in Portugal whose research was based on families of old soldiers that came from the colonial war.”
Drawing from the case studies Ribeiro has since read, he explains that soldiers of war can pass their internalized stress on to their partners, and that those partners can then take on that stress and pass it on to the children. In this way, according to Ribeiro and his research, war can live on in families for many generations. So, as Portugal’s people spent the 80s, 90s, and 2000s building a country of peace, war raged on within the families of soldiers and spread until it affected an entire society.
This spread of trauma is illustrated in Ribeiro’s film, most prominently within the characters of Nayola and Yara. But, while Ribeiro has personal experience with the effects of war on human lives, as a man, he knew his film, based on a play also written by two men, needed the authentic perspective of women.
“When I went to Angola, and I found the three actresses who would play the women in this story, I showed them the script, asked them how they felt about these women, and if there was anything in their personal stories that they could find a connection with to their characters,” shares Ribeiro. “There were moments where I started to feel like these actresses were guiding the characters, and were guiding me as well, and all I was really doing was giving feedback.”
He continues, “It’s one of the reasons this film took such a long time to make, because it was not a story that came from inside me. It’s something that came from lots of communication between myself and these women.”
Elisângela Rita, who voices for Nayola, is a spoken word artist who Jose invited to adapt her poem “Mulher Mulembeira” for the film, specifically for Sequence 7, during the scene between Nayola and a military shooter she meets on her journey to find her husband. As the shooter is playing his guitar under a Mulemba tree, also known as “royal tree,” Nayola embraces the tree and begins to recite Rita’s poem.
In English, it says this:
Mulemba, Mulemba…
I find myself
In the comfort of your shade
In the firmness of your roots
We remain lovers.
Here, time doesn’t exist
And we are happy
The soul is still in shade
The presence that sustains the earth
And makes us survive any war.
You can hear Rita reciting her original poem here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJR8pGpqjwM&t=73s
“I’ve never made a film like this,” says Ribeiro. “Normally, I write the dialogue, I give it to the actors, and they may adapt it a little bit, but the actor is still the actor. In this case, that distance between the actors and myself was not created. And I didn't want it. And maybe for my next film, I’ll do the same thing. Because working with these actors, writing with them, helped the film to move in a very organic direction. I like to bring truth to fiction. It makes for a better story.”
Truth was at the core of everything Ribeiro produced for Nayola, which is why the ending of the film isn’t exactly a happy one.
“Stories of war never have happy endings,” he says. “Maybe, we can take those unhappy experiences, and make something good out of them, but there will always be a part of that experience that stays like a ghost around us. So, I knew that any happy ending for the story wouldn’t be me being honest with myself.”
But still, Ribeiro didn’t want his film to be dark, depressing and without hope. So, he brought even more light and color saturation to the film toward the end, inspired by African artists, like the Mozambican painter “Malangatana,” the sharp and dreamy graphics of African masks, and Angolan dresses filled with contrasting reds and greens.
“I wanted to bring some light and this mythic connection to the cosmos, because I need it,” says Ribeiro. “I'm a positive person. I need light in my life. It’s curious because Mia Couto told me later, when I showed him the film, that the play he wrote, which I was inspired by, was the darkest story he’d written.”
The story is dark in tone but bright in visuals. It’s filled with death but illustrated with such life. The final scenes of Nayola showcase bright yellow deserts and luminescent moonscapes, paying homage to the San People (or Bushman tribes) and their sacred connection with nature. It’s a fine way to end a story about war, which often corrupts nature.
“I still wanted the film to have a positive message and leave people with hope that new generations can change the world and make it a better place for those who will come after,” shares Ribeiro. “Yara’s character represents that hope in the story.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
