Short film
Bonfire
Fogata
João Ribeiro · 1992
Synopsis
Around a fire, a community sings the formula “karingana wa karingana”, and a storyteller tells a story he has from his grandfather. The fields are dry; an old man from the South has married a local girl. One day, he tells his wife that it is better to start digging his grave while he still has the strength, and he sets to it stubbornly while she watches him. Suspicions surface between them: one evening he asks her what she has put in his food.
Context
The film adapts a short story by Mia Couto published in 1986. Its director, who was returning from his studies in Cuba, shot it in 1992, as the civil war was ending: it is his first film. It opens a series of short films taken from the same writer, before the feature film that the director was to make from one of his novels in 2010. The same short story also inspired a Brazilian short film.
Who it is for
In Portuguese. The film keeps from the short story its way of telling, in which the fantastic and the everyday are not separated, and in which death is spoken of without emphasis.
Prizes and reception
Martin Mhando sees in it a film that recovers the form of the oral tale and, for its way of mixing history and imagination, likens it to Ruy Guerra's Mueda.
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