Postcolonial testimony and the ruins of empire

Abstract

Mozambican stories and the remains of empireThe acclaimed filmmaker Licínio de Azevedo has been based in Mozambique since the 1970s.Leaving Brazil under the military dictatorship, he travelled to post-revolutionary Portugal in 1976.From there, he moved on to Guinea-Bissau, trained journalists, and interviewed members of the PAIGC about their experiences in the fight for independence against Portuguese armed forces (Azevedo and Rodrigues, 1977). Later, Azevedo continued this type of journalistic work in Mozambique by publishing Relatos do Povo Armado (Reports of the Armed People, Azevedo, 1983), a book about Frelimo's struggle against the Portuguese colonial regime. 1 Besides his work as a journalist, Azevedo began working at the Instituto de Comunicação Social in Maputo at the end of the 1970s. There, he participated in experiments for the introduction of television and met Jean-Luc Godard and other filmmakers from Brazil and Europe pursuing projects at the Instituto Nacional de Cinema (INC, National Film Institute) (Andrade -Watkins, 1995;Fendler, 2014). During the 1980s, while mainly involved themselves in the production of educational films, he started to focus on his own works, which pushed the boundaries of documentary films by exploring the poetic potentials of moving images and music. By doing so, he situated his work somewhat outside the official discourse of Frelimo, which underlined its victory over the colonial regime and focused on the war against Renamo (Convents, 2011, p. 522). Around 1990, Azevedo, Pedro Pimenta, and others were involved in founding Ébano Multimédia. This and other private production companies were emerging as the civil war ended and official state television and film production were in crisis (Fendler, 2018). In this period, his films focused on the consequences of the protracted civil war