Are even the best and brightest revolutionary movements doomed to inevitable compromise, betrayal and failure? That question haunts this documentary, a biography of Angolan-born Mário Pinto de Andrade (1928–1990), a key figure in African revolutionary and anti-colonial struggles.
Bergmanesque ghosts appear at the bedside of Edward Weki, a 75-year-old Sudanese man suffering from the final stage of Parkinson’s: Alma, the nurse of Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona, and a female version of Death from his The Seventh Seal help the old man recover lost memories of his life on the island of Farö.
A young woman works as a prison guard in a hopelessly overcrowded jail in central Madagascar. She passes the time daydreaming about her father, a murderer, who abandoned her as a child after killing his own brother. In her imagination, her father becomes a mythical killer, wandering the countryside and rolling enchanted dice to decide the fate of his victims. Secretly, she yearns for the day her father will turn up amongst the prisoners. When a new inmate arrives claiming to know her father, her fantasies begin to turn to nightmares.
Immobile in a home where the sands of time fall to the rhythm of the rural Azerbaijani sounds, a mother waits for her son. When he arrives, their conversations circle around existential questions and news from afar. Unrest cloaks the world outside. Mother and son grow closer, silence melts into words, and life springs between them. The son leaves, and winter settles in to the forever-outdated house in which temporalities blurs and past and present beat to the rhythm of the same clock.
Eddie, a 65-year-old man from Sudan, seems to have been living for countless days on a remote stone-covered Swedish island. Surrounded by screaming birds and carrying a silent past, Eddie wanders around in nature, recollecting moments with a broken video camera. Accompanied by Jan, a ghostly hermit living deep in the forest, Eddie penetrates an otherwise hostile environment that is oblivious to his isolation. Despite his circumstances, Eddie looks for the miraculous in the overlooked present time.
An industrial film on two kinds of labour: socialist and capitalist. A poetic investigation of human relations with the soil and the Earth. A striking journey from Poland to Taiwan that makes us think, contemplate and dream. Pure film.
