Genre Documentary

Conakry (2013)

Item: Conakry
Rating: 1.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★½ — Conakry (2013)

Amílcar Cabral remains one of the most significant political theorists and revolutionary leaders to emerge from twentieth-century Africa, yet outside of academic circles and the countries he helped shape, his name rarely surfaces in mainstream conversation. The founder of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (known by its Portuguese acronym PAIGC), Cabral led the armed independence struggle against Portuguese colonial rule in the 1960s and early 1970s before his assassination in 1973, just months before Guinea-Bissau declared independence. He left behind a considerable body of writing on culture, identity and resistance that continues to be studied and debated today. It is that legacy, and the question of what his archive means to a world on the other side of African liberation, that forms the subject of this short film from 2013.

Conakry is the work of Portuguese filmmaker Filipa César, whose practice sits somewhere between essay film, installation art and documentary. Shot on 16mm in a single continuous take, the film was staged at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, a venue with its own layered history as a space for non-European culture within the German capital. César invited Grada Kilomba, a Portuguese writer and artist, and Diana McCarty, an American radio activist, to respond to archival images of Cabral and to reflect on what that visual record carries with it. At eleven minutes, it sits closer to the short films you might encounter at a gallery opening or as part of a festival programme than to the feature-length documentaries most audiences are used to. For context on how documentary filmmaking can work across very different registers, it is worth comparing this with something like Candomblé in Togo (1972) or the more recent Nom Tèw (2009), both of which I have covered here and which each approach cultural and historical subjects through their own distinct documentary methods. César's approach is deliberately poetic and reflective rather than expository, which is a reasonable artistic choice, though one that comes with its own set of risks in terms of how the work lands with a general audience.

The two participants on screen bring credentials from well outside conventional filmmaking. Kilomba's work frequently engages with race, memory and colonial history through both written and performance forms, while McCarty has spent years involved in community and activist radio. Neither is a documentary subject in the traditional sense; they function more as interlocutors, thinking aloud through the archive rather than presenting a finished argument. César has spoken elsewhere about her interest in decolonising film archives themselves, treating the act of looking at historical footage as something that requires active, critical engagement rather than passive consumption. Whether that intention translates on screen is, of course, another matter entirely, and one that sits squarely with the experience of watching it.

A-Z World Movie Tour Guinea-Bissau Being 100% honest, in terms of documentaries it's 12 minutes long and it's a woman reading from sheets of paper while slideshows of their former anti-colonialism leader are shown in the background. It's really basic and the sound quality is bad too. Sometimes the mic messes up or you can hear kids crying in the background. It also ends completely abruptly. I'm sure the subject matter is really good it's just delivered in a really non-engaging way

I stumbled onto Conakry as part of my ongoing A-Z World Movie Tour working through Guinea-Bissau, and I will be honest: the gallery-installation context that this was clearly made for does a lot of heavy lifting that simply is not there when you watch it at home. The subject matter genuinely deserves better treatment, and the technical roughness only makes it harder to stay with. If you are after documentaries from this part of the world or from German co-productions that actually hold your attention, you might have more luck with Lingui, the Sacred Bonds (2021) or even Lost Boy in Juba (2017), both of which I found far more rewarding watches. Cabral's story is still out there waiting for the film it deserves.

Rating: ★½ | Year: 2013 | Watched: 2025-06-26

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