THE NIGHTS STILL SMELL OF GUNPOWDER

Premiered at the Berlinale’s Forum section (dedicated to productions with a particular sense for the aesthetic), this film is a hypnotic investigation into the aftermath of the civil war in Mozambique. Inadelso Cossa returns to his grandmother’s village to revisit her memories of that time – when she disguised the bombings as “fireworks” – and today has Alzheimer’s, exploring two ways of distorting the facts. Rummaging through photographs, archives and distant yet still resonant voices, the filmmaker navigates the labyrinth of personal and collective memory to understand the complex scars of the past and seek reconciliation in this living history. Like Pedro Costa or Joshua Oppenheimer, he approaches trauma by exploring documentary language, transcending the visual to evoke the synaesthetic nature of memories: the days race by like gunpowder, yet its scent lingers in the dark of the night.