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The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder
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The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder
IDFA 2024

The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder

As noites ainda cheiram a pólvora
Inadelso Cossa
Mozambique, France, Germany, Portugal, Netherlands, Norway
2024
93 min
Dutch Premiere
Best of Fests
Festival history

Thirty-two years after the end of Mozambique’s civil war, in which a million people died, the smell of terror still hangs in the air. As a child, Inadelso Cossa was shielded from the cruel reality. Now he visits the village of his youth with his sound recordist Moises in a sensory search for the ghosts of the past.

Conversations with villagers—including his grandmother, who has dementia, and a former rebel, who drinks to forget—are punctuated by shots of family photos strewn among the leaves or an empty chair against the same background.

In a personal voice-over, Cossa reflects on the past, and how it resonates in the present, casting a shadow over the future. The memories he encounters are sometimes faded, fictionalized or distorted, and past and present seem to merge, especially in the dark of the night.

In this dream-like atmosphere, Cossa, who previously evoked his country’s violent past in A Memory in Three Acts (2016), now creates a penetrating, poetic ode to a people marked by collective trauma.

Credits
Director
Production
    Inadelso Cossa for 16mmFILMES,
    Emilie Dudognon for IDA.IDA,
    Thomas Kaske for Kaske Film
Co-production
Sound Design
    Moises Langa
    Moises Langa
World Sales
    Syndicado
    Syndicado
Screening copy
    Syndicado
    Syndicado

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