Terra Sonâmbula

Not many film-goers may be aware of Portuguese director Teresa Prata's "Sleepwalking land." A film that took Ms Prata 7 years to complete, it is yet to be extensively screened beyond the international film festival circuit. The movie is evidently Ms Prata's labor of love after she spotted a goldmine in Mia Couto's Portuguese novel "Sleepwalking land" published in 1992. The novel is now widely recognized as one of the finest literary works from and on Africa in recent years. Extracts translated into English that I read indicate a remarkable, powerful literary work, falling within the realm of magical realism. It was indeed a work screaming to be captured on celluloid with the help of special effects and convincing local acting talent. The young lady grabbed the opportunity to shoot the film in Mozambique and do the special effects in Portugal. Today her interesting movie adaptation is helping publicize Mia Couto's writing even further and is bringing global attention to both the Mozambican and the Portuguese cinema.

"Sleepwalking land." is one of the most interesting and realistic films on Africa. In the past two months, the film has won the international FIPRESCI award for the best film in competition at the recent Kerala film festival, and an award for best director at the lesser known Pune film festival.

The book "Sleepwalking Land" and film based on the novel are both set during the 15-year civil war that crippled Mozambique. Mia Cuoto has a gifted philosophical turn of phrase to describe the catastrophe of the war: "what's already burnt can't burn again." The film (as in the book) looks back wistfully at the tragedy of the unrest through the eyes of a dreaming orphan boy and provides a glimmer of hope for the survivors of civil anarchy to cope with what is left to build anew. While Mia Cuoto and Teresa Prata focus on the social and economic plight of Mozambique, their respective works can equally mirror the problems of the continent.

The film follows a young orphaned Mozambican boy Muidinga (an endearing performance by an acting novice, Nick Lauro Teresa), who can fortunately read as he had once attended school and is even familiar with Melville's Moby Dick, and his unrelated, illiterate guardian, a wise old man called Tuahir (played by non-professional actor Aladino Jasse), tossed accidentally together by the civil war. The film and the book trace their common will to survive the difficult days. The young boy might have read. or rather heard, the story of Moby Dick, but the name is indelible in his memory. Director Teresa Prata, who adapted the story for cinema, therefore takes creative license, and allows the young boy to call his pet goat "Mody (sic) Dick." (When I questioned the director on this detail, she stated that she was responsible for this change and that it was not part of Couto's book.)

The film and book have two parallel plots. The young boy and the old man, on the run in the bushes from marauding, gun-toting factions of the civil war, come across a charred bus with burnt corpses and their possessions that escaped the fire. Among the possessions of the dead passengers are notebooks that tell a story of a woman named Farida, a squatter on an abandoned ship, waiting for her young son to find her, and a hardworking young man Kindzu, who has fled his burning village that has faced the wrath of the civil war-mongers. In this discovered manuscript, Kindzu meets Farida. Subsequently, Kindzu goes searching for Farida's lost son.

The young boy narrates the tale to the illiterate old man, after reading the manuscript, and begins to associate Farida as his lost mother. He even imagines the name of the ship she is squatting on is called "Mody (sic) Dick" (again, Ms Prata's contribution to the story).

The parallel love story of Farida and Kindzu never takes center stage—the backbone remains the dreams of the young boy under the guiding spirit of the wise old man. Between the two, the viewer of the film is introduced to the problems of Mozambique, of Africa, of any developing country. As in a Greek tragedy, you trudge along a path that gives you a notion of travel and progress, only to return to the same spot, literally and metaphorically.

Pretense and dreams make the film move along. To aid the young boy on his "journey" to his "loving mother Farida" squatting on "Mody (sic) Dick," the old man devises the means to reach the sea (Indian Ocean) from the bushes of Mozambique. The old man digs a hole in the ground. Water sprouts and a stream forms. The stream becomes a river and at the end of the river there is the ocean. In the Ocean, the lead characters find the derelict "Mody (sic) Dick" with Farida on it. Obviously, if you demand conventional realism—there is very little that the film can offer. If you accept magical realism as a tool to narrate a realistic socio-political scenario in Africa, both Mia Couto and Teresa Prata have much to offer and delight your senses.

The viewer gets a glimpse Couto's Mozambique. But among the ruins, Couto and Prata, show a glimmer of hope in the form of an orphan, representing the new generation, learning hard lessons of life in the bush. Ms Prata has made a fine effort to extract remarkable performances from non-professional actors and has proved her capability to adapt and direct an interesting work that would be interesting for any person interested in good African cinema. This film may not be a cinematic masterpiece, but a fine example of good African cinema by a gifted and persevering lady from another continent.

The description of a civil-war torn country itself as a sleepwalking land offers fodder for thought, beyond the usual images of violence, poverty and carnage that adorn the typical Africa cinema.

Jugu Abraham s review sums this up well and there's not much I want to add. The director uses film language to make very effective use of landscape and mise en scene, such as the burnt out bus. The bus and the journey the two characters go on is like a metaphor for life, we keep repeating ourselves, or those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it. Images from this keep coming back to my mind such as the toy boat which opens the film. Use of visual cues like this indicate a skilled film maker in that they elicit an emotional response. Moving you to tears while completely avoiding sentimentality. I saw this at The London African Film Festival and thought it incredibly powerful, really moving, emotionally quite draining. Whats great about African cinema is its seriousness, its willingness to engage with important issues. For enthusiasts of African visual media and those willing to make the conceptual leap necessary to appreciate new cultural forms, this is highly recommended. I will just add this seems to me a fusion of African and European sensibilities. The poetic realism has an obvious European influence but there's nonetheless something distinctly African there, and I m not just meaning the setting. There's a whole thing about journeys, returning and fatalism, things being set, things being a certain way. See it yourself, I think it will leave you like it left me, wondering.........or wandering?

A boy and old man stop by a still-burning bus. "We will stay here" says the man, and they take up residence, explore the area around, and avoid other people. There's a civil war going on in Mozambique, and what the unseen soldiers don't destroy, the gangs of men do. The boy has no memory, but can read, and so he reads to the old man from a diary about a sailor who rows to a ship where only a woman is. The old man initiates the boy into manhood -- this will shock many modern westerners -- and tells him about things the boy has not seen, that indeed, neither of them have.

It's a movie about myth-making, the effort to make sense out of the world, set in a world that no longer makes any sense. The boy reads from the book, and is puzzled when the old man asks if he has invented any truths. The man tells him how the world was created.

Much of the movie is taken up with the two simply talking; given my unfamiliarity with Portuguese as it is spoken in Mozambique, I can't tell if the acting is particularly good, so it seems uncinematic to me. Nonetheless, the relationships and ideas behind the film are compelling.

Set during the brutal 15 year civil war in Mozambique following its liberation from Portugal, this film opens with a boy wandering the countryside with a man he calls "uncle." They come across a recently burned out old bus with charred corpses inside, and take shelter. The sense of the horrifying reality they're in is quite apparent, and if this is a sleepwalking land, it must be an absolute nightmare. The boy finds a diary and begins reading about a young man who lost his family and then came across a woman in an abandoned ship missing her son, which sets in motion a parallel story.

All of these lives are fractured, having lost loved ones to atrocities and seemingly in an endless loop, much as the boy and man's wanderings always lead them back to the bus. There is danger all around, with roving, heavily armed gangs patrolling the roads, land mines in the brush, and people who've gone nuts, such as the guy who catches them in a net and then threatens to bury them.

With that said, director Teresa Prata exercises restraint in showing the violence, and the film really doesn't dwell on the grim reality of the war. Instead, it gradually injects bits of magical realism and tells an uplifting story of trying to look out for others, find family, and survive, all under devastating conditions, and all while dreaming of getting away or of the war ending. The stories ultimately bend together in a lovely, touching way.

Be forewarned though, there are some disturbing scenes involving children, and I don't just mean the kinds of violence or murder you might expect from a film set during the civil war. In one of them, a man nonchalantly wheels his daughter around strapped down in a backbreaking position over a barrel to "twist her body like a snake" so that she can "become famous." In another, the "uncle" to the pre-adolescent boy cheerfully masturbates him, and while I learned from a Prata interview afterwards that this is a depiction of a common initiation rite in Mozambique, it was more than a little repelling to me. I appreciated the honesty and learning something about another culture, but in reading up on these rites and the initiation camps they're ordinarily conducted in, it was tough to see this as joyful, as the film portrays it.