Movies: Filipa César

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....

The first image is in black and white, upside down and projected into a black box that then becomes the frame. It now hovers like a time capsule near a man’s face. He looks down, listening in on a female guerrilla fighter and translating her words fr...

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....

Shot during an NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) seminar in Berlin, a group fluxuates between guided meditation and discussion on consciousness and self-acceptance. Neuro-linguistic programming is a set of techniques and beliefs that are used primar...

Loves are found and lost. Families disappear and start. Houses, denouements, solitude, friendship. All that we keep, and all that we leave behind. Shot on Super 8 film between 2010 and 2018 in Portugal, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Italy, Guinea-Bi...

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 clo...

"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...

An experimental documentary film of collective research into creolization, addressing its historical, ontological and cultural forces....

In Cacheu, Filipa César once again applies the economic technique of using a single shot – letting a 16mm film roll to the end – without editing. Here, the montage is a process that takes place before shooting, so that the image produced is the resul...

The lighthouse, as a man-made object built to shed light into the dark unknown, encapsulates perfectly the desires of the Enlightenment project of modernity: the domination of nature through reason and intellect, the advancement of technology and tra...

The Portuguese colonial past is actualized through performance....

The film INSERT was conceived has part of MEMOGRAMA by Filipa César, an installation that approaches the history of Castro Marim, a village in the southeast of Portugal, known for salt production and as a location for banishment and forced labour. Th...

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 colon...

The film-essay Mined Soil revisits the work of the Guinean agronomist Amílcar Cabral, who studied soil erosion in the Alentejo region of Portugal through the lens of his political engagement as a leader of the African Liberation Movement of the 1950s...

Often underestimated as such, the anti-colonial wars of liberation were also large scale educational endeavours. Consider the educational strategies pursued by agronomist Amílcar Cabral and the PAIGC. Among those, the Pilot School to form “the best s...

In Porto, 1975 the subjective viewpoint of the camera takes us through another emblematic example of Portuguese history from the 1970s, thanks to a single long take lasting the whole duration of a 16 mm reel. Bouça was a social housing project initia...