What Makes Quim Run? (1991)
★★ — What Makes Quim Run? (1991)
What Makes Quim Run? is a short Angolan drama from 1991, running at just twenty-two minutes and produced under the banner of the Laboratório Nacional de Cinema, the state film body that was central to Angola's post-independence filmmaking efforts. The film arrives at a period when Angolan cinema was still finding its feet, the country having gained independence from Portugal in 1975 only to be plunged almost immediately into a civil war that would not end until 2002. Against that backdrop, making films at all was a considerable undertaking, and the LNC operated as something close to a lifeline for local production, often working with limited resources and, by necessity, whatever equipment could be sourced. The result, across the institution's output, was a body of work that was frequently rough around the edges but no less honest for it. For anyone curious about African cinema beyond the better-known francophone traditions, films like this one represent a genuinely rare window into a different set of experiences and preoccupations. You might also find that window opened, in different ways, by Sugar Cane Alley, another drama rooted in the colonial and post-colonial experience.
The film was directed by Mariano Bartolomeu, and the premise centres on Quim, a young fighter pilot whose world begins to fracture after the birth of his child. Unable to reconcile himself to his new reality, he rejects the counsel of those around him, including his mother's suggestion that he consult a traditional healer, and instead spirals inward, pursuing his former mistress Djamila while the line between what is real and what is imagined begins to dissolve. The film positions this personal crisis as a metaphor for Angola itself in the years following independence: a nation struggling to process trauma, caught between old ways of understanding the world and the pressures of a changed present. Bartolomeu uses that premise to work in a register that is part social realism, part psychological portrait, with the three principal leads, Alfonso William Malheiros, Maria-João Swart, and Sandra Pitra, carrying the weight of a story told on an evidently modest budget. Short-form drama from this corner of the world rarely gets much coverage in Western film writing, which is part of what makes a review like this one worth reading. For a sense of how other low-budget productions from the same era hold up under scrutiny, the site's coverage of Dhanmalhi and Fire in the Sky, both from the early 1990s, offer some useful points of comparison.
This film is like stepping into a time machine, one that accidentally got stuck in the 1950s. Shot with vintage cameras and old-school techniques, it looks and feels like it was made decades earlier than it actually was. That weirdly worked in its favour. It gives everything this gritty, nostalgic charm that I wasn’t expecting to enjoy… but really did. It’s also one of the more competently made low-budget African films I’ve seen lately. The acting is solid, the pacing holds up, and there’s clearly some heart behind the project (even if the story is a little confusing to follow). It tells a story about a fighter pilot, war trauma, and family secrets in post-colonial Angola, which alone makes it worth a watch for anyone interested in Angolan cinema or regional history. But here’s where things get uncomfortable. The film hinges on a deeply problematic premise: the protagonist has a child born with two heads, and instead of treating her with dignity, they call her a "creature," a "monster," and use her deformity as the reason he runs away from home and into the arms of his mistress. That’s not just dated, it’s hurtful, dehumanising, and completely unnecessary to tell the story they were going for. So yes, technically interesting, culturally curious, and occasionally compelling… but weighed down by subject matter that crosses a line. It’s hard to fully recommend it without a big caveat. Worth watching once, just for completionists, but not without some serious side-eye.
I keep coming back to that tension between what the film achieves technically and what it does with its central conceit, and I don't think I can resolve it any more neatly than the film itself does. There is something genuinely valuable here for anyone with an interest in Angolan history or the broader sweep of African cinema, and I would not want that to get lost entirely in the criticism. But the criticism stands, and it is not the kind you can bracket off to one side and enjoy the rest. Films that use disability as a plot device to motivate a protagonist's worst behaviour have a long and unfortunate history, and acknowledging the cultural and historical context of a production does not oblige you to wave that through unchallenged. Worth the twenty-two minutes, yes, but go in with your eyes open.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 1991 | Watched: 2025-05-23
Related on Movies With Macca
More from the 1990s: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · Blue (1993) · Cemetery Man (1994)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
