Portuguese movie: "A Costa dos murmúrios"

The portuguese movie "A Costa dos Murmúrios" (from 2004) has just come out in Brussels. If you have the chance, I recommend it.

It is the first fiction movie of Mozambique born Margarida Cardoso, 41, a director who has produced some successful documentaries in Portugal. With "A Costa dos Murmúrios", Margarida Cardoso goes back to Mozambique, setting the scene in the last years of a long and disastrous colonial war (end of the 60ies), in which Portugal lost itself, stubbornly trying to save a condemned empire. It tells the story of Evita (by the excellent Beatriz Batarda), who arrives in Mozambique to marry Luís, a maths student who is doing his military service there. Evita soon finds out that Luís is not the same anymore and that, perturbed by the war, had become a sad imitator of his captain, Forza Leal. The men leave for big military manoeuvres in the north of the country. Evita stays alone and in the despair of trying to understand what has made Luís change, seeks the company of Helena, Forza Leal’s wife. Submissive and humiliated, Helena is a prisoner in her own house. She reveals the dark side of Luís to Evita…Lost in a world that is not her own, Evita soon realises the violence of a colonial time close to its end. A time of war, of loss and of guilt.

The movie adapted one of the best books (“A Costa dos Murmúrios") by Lídia Jorge, one of the most famous contemporary portuguese writers. The novel, written in 1988, had sold more than 50,000 in less than a year and has been translated in seven languages. This is one of the first Portuguese movies (as the book) to revisit a complex and troubled time in Portugal’s History, which still remains nowadays silent and a painful wound. By adopting an intimate and original point of view, Margarida Cardoso was capable to give the movie a universal dimension.