The new feature documentary Fire In The Mud (Fogo no Lodo, screening in the Portuguese competition in Doclisboa) unfolds in Unal, a rice producing village in Guinea-Bissau where the elders still have strong memories of the colonial war, lasting from 1963 to1974, in which the country fought for its independence from Portugal.
Director Catarina Laranjeiro’s links with Guinea-Bissau stretch back to 2009 when she worked there with an NGO and learned the language, Creole. A few years later, her partner, visual artist, filmmaker and scholar Daniel Barroca accompanied her there. He had a strong personal connection with the country. His father had been a soldier in the Portuguese army during the war of independence.
“The film started with her [Catarina] alone and then I joined. I went as an assistant. Then I started getting involved and I became a director,” he explains their close collaboration on the project.
Research on the doc began in 2016. One challenge was the terrain. Unal is a very, very muddy place. The film has footage of the villagers up to their knees in the sludge as they work in the fields.
“First of all, it’s extremely difficult simply to walk in those conditions,” Barroca testifies to how the ground would give way beneath the filmmakers’ feet. “Even if you don’t carry a camera or any sort of equipment, it is already very complicated.”
The filmmakers had an assistant who was “very experienced” in walking on such treacherous surfaces. He would help them find a “steady place” where the ground was solid enough to take the weight of a tripod. The crew was kept very small. There was no electricity in the villages but when the storms started, everything would suddenly be illuminated for a few moments by the flashes of lightning.
Fire In The Mud deals with the colonial war in a deliberately subtle and lyrical way. There aren’t voice overs or captions.
“The very beginning of our idea was to make a film about the war. At that moment, our idea was to be more direct about it. But once we got to the village and started getting involved with the community, the first thing we realised was that the young generation was very distant from that war already,” Barroca reflects. “They were not talking about it so much. They were more worried about other issues in their contemporary lives. Most were born after the war. To them, the war was like a narrative from the past, like a fairy tale, a violent one, but really lost in the past.”
The filmmakers were determined to “capture the voices” of the villagers of all ages, not to impose their “own agenda on the narrative.”
Laranjeiro comes from a visual anthropology and history background. She has done extensive research into post-colonial history. Herrpartner is from a fine arts background although he also later began to study anthropology too.
The filmmakers were intrigued by the superstitions of the villagers. “It’s a mix of fascination, of scepticism, of academic interest, of trying to be rational about things that sound very irrational,” Barroca says of their own reactions to the idea that humans can become crocodiles or that spirits can occupy two bodies at once. He points out, though, that the “community is very diverse religiously speaking. They have old religion when they talk about the spirits and the people who are turning into animals…then you have the Christians, the Protestants and the evangelicals. Then you have the Muslims.”
The village, then, was a melting pot of different views and cultures. “All that diversity is extremely fascinating…it all became so complex and interesting. Everything is so beautiful and aesthetically fascinating, the songs they sing in the church, the way they pray in the mosque, the way they talk about the sports. Everything is very, very rich,” Barroca says.
He further points out how Laranjeiro had strong ties with the community, built up over many years. While other journalists, filmmakers and researchers would make fleeting visits there “and never showed up again,” she kept on returning.
It helped that both filmmakers had become fluent in Creole. They were keen to find out how the colonial war was viewed through the prism of the old religion. Barroca was upfront about his father’s involvement in that war. “Yes, I told them about my past and motivations in returning were. I was very surprised. It was very well received actually. The older people, they had this respect for the Portuguese soldiers who were in the same war. I never felt this hatred. I felt this nostalgia for youth…it’s difficult to explain, but they were soldiers when they were very young.”
One of the elders worked out that he had fought directly against Barroca’s father. They had been in the same place at the same time…but in different armies.
The villagers were fascinated by the filmmakers. “They were directing us,” Laranjeiro recalls of how onlookers would often suggest which scenes they should shoot. The “healer,” who is one of the subjects, would tell crew members where to stand and even recruited extras to pretend they were sick and needed his touch. “We didn’t have to do anything, just stand, shoot and report,” Laranjeiro adds of how creative decisions were sometimes made for them.
The project was made through production outfit Kintop and with support from ICA (the Portuguese Film and Audiovisual Institute). The filmmakers are still in touch with the village and hope soon to show their film there. “They don’t have electricity [in the village] but they have this amazing system of small solar panels which they use to charge their phones and have some internet…they have these radios that are always on and they listen to the football on the radio. They have their smartphones and there is a black market of films,” Barroca observes of how this seemingly remote village is, in fact, very connected to the outside world.
The two directors are currently entering the doc into other international festivals. Barroca is hard at work finishing his PHD in anthropology while Laranjeiro is busy teaching at university but the duo are hoping soon to hatch future film projects. One idea is a documentary on “vernacular filmmaking” by people in Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and beyond on their cellphones.
“[But] I have too much administrative functions and [too] little time for my creative work!” Laranjeiro sighs.
