A Yellow Animal

Fernando, an eccentric and bankrupt Brazilian director, travels to Mozambique in search of inspiration (and something else) to finish his masterpiece.

The story is told like a fable, between the world of fantasy and reality, adressing subjects such as sexual discrimination, racism, gem smuggling and conformism, with a very consistent, and above all, current and corrosive narrative.

The main theme talks about denial and regret, but above all, about the pain and the impact that colonialism still has on the lives of the people who inhabit the lands invaded and stolen by the Portuguese discoveries.

There are interesting metaphors and allegories throughout the film, which individualize each character and their 'yellow animal' in a very capable and satisfying way.

As a portuguese myself, I find this type of films very important for awareness and to start to discuss openly about these problems.

Produced by Brazil, Mozambique and Portugal, it is an allegoric surrealist film, full of fantastic elements, which translates the social political history of people and societies of the three countries in the web of economic relations, violence, lies, domination, prejudices, racism, cynicism, sublimation, greed, patriarchalism, vanity, dehumanization. It is an unique movie: unconventional, innovative, weird, poetic, acidic, crude, bizarre, political, complex, encompassing. The text in the film (dialogues, songs, narration...), quite poetic, has numerous ironies and is extremely smart, even when they are quite literal. Visually, in the movie, good cinematography, art direction, naked bodies (both female and male, with lots of frontal nudity) and a masked hairy yellowish monster compose this mosaic together with few stop motion animated parts. Past slavery remains by other means in personal relationships. Hatred and revenge wishes are expected consequences. People worth as much as they can be used in this heartless world. Family heritages are often not beautiful, and happiness is not among the rewards for being cruel. Through five parts (or from the third to the fifth, as the two first ones are about his ancestor and his teen age), a white Brazilian filmmaker goes in an Ulyssean journey deep himself in order to rebuild his past and memories or to understand it and, then, tell it in his very movie. In the background, Brazil "enters a fever delirium of amnesia and pain" since 2016 coup. It is a film to be re-watched from time to time.