AS NOITES AINDA CHEIRAM A PÓLVORA (THE NIGHTS STILL SMELL OF GUNPOWDER)

Inadelso Cossa  
Mozambique/ Germany/ France/ Portugal/ Netherlands/ Norway 2024 | Original Version with English Subtitles | 93 min | In the presence of Thomas Kaske (producer)

FR 15 NOV
19:00 ARSENAL

In this poetic film essay, Mozambican filmmaker Inadelso Cossa returns to the village of his childhood after many years to relive the memories of the civil war that devastated Mozambique from 1977 to 1992. He meets his grandmother Maria, who is now suffering from the first signs of Alzheimer’s disease: Between truth and fiction, memory and forgetting, AS NOITES AINDA CHEIRAM A PÓLVORA is a testimony to the resilience of human memory. Cossa uses the means of cinema to recapture lost fragments of history and to encounter the ghosts that live on in the darkness of social silence.
Der Film feierte seine internationale Premiere im Forum der diesjährigen Berlinale.

The film celebrated its international premiere in the Forum of this year’s Berlinale.

INADELSO COSSA (*1984) is a director, producer and cinematographer and has been a member of AMPAS (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science) since 2020. He is the founder of 16mmFILMES, a production company that focuses on creative documentaries and fiction films. His films deal with themes such as post-colonial memory, post-civil war trauma, silent voices and collective amnesia in Mozambique. The unofficial history of his country is at the center of his films, in which the director positions himself from a personal perspective.

His first feature-length documentary A MEMORY IN THREE ACTS was selected for Locarno Open Doors 2014 and celebrated its world premiere at the IDFA – International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam. The film won the Special Jury Prize at the Zanzibar International Film Festival 2018 and the Prize of the Flemish Commission for Unesco at the Africa Film Festival Leuven 2020. AS NOITES AINDA CHEIRAM A PÓLVORA is his second feature film.