Miguel Eek’s “Amílcar,” which will world premiere in IDFA’s Envision Competition, has debuted its trailer. Odd Slice Films is handling international sales on the film, which is about an African anti-colonialist leader.
The director, producer Javier Del Álamo, co-scriptwriter Alba Lombardía and editor Federico Delpero Bejar will attend the premiere in Amsterdam on Nov. 16.
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The film is described as a “poetic documentary essay” on Amílcar Cabral – agronomist, poet and revolutionary – who led the anti-colonial struggle in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. The film blends archive footage with recent 16mm imagery to reveal “a visionary whose ideas on justice and dignity remain urgent today.”
Through his political writings, poems and private letters, the film re-imagines Cabral’s inner voice to “guide viewers on a personal and historical journey,” blending unpublished archives, Portuguese colonial films, and revolutionary Guinean footage with newly shot 16mm images. It is a “meditative visual diary that evokes both the public figure and the private man: the visionary leader and the thinker in solitude.”
In less than a decade, Cabral united more than a million Guineans in the struggle against Portuguese colonial rule, liberating three-quarters of the countryside of Guinea-Bissau and inspiring other African nations to rebel and claim their independence. He was assassinated by members of his own party, PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde), in 1973.
The script is by Lombardía and Eek. The producers are Eek, Del Álamo, Luis Correia and Marie Dumoulin. The film is produced by Mosaic Producciones and co-produced by Les Docs du Nord in France, Lx Filmes in Portugal, Sysifos in Sweden, and Korikaxoru in Cape Verde. It was produced with the support of Institut d’Estudis Balearics, CNC, Procirep, Pictanovo, ICIB, ICAA, Creative Europe, ICA and RTP.