‘Amilcar’ review: Impressionistic study of Guinea-Bissau-born poet and revolutionary Amilcar Cabral

Dir: Miguel Eek. Spain/Portugal/France/Sweden/Cape Verde. 2025. 87mins

Agronomist, political theorist and revolutionary Amilcar Cabral led the primary resistance motion in sub-Saharan Africa to efficiently obtain independence from a colonial energy via armed wrestle. However Spanish documentarist Miguel Eek is not simply in Cabral the guerilla, who fought to liberate Guinea-Bissau from Portuguese rule; utilizing his topic’s personal political writings and poems, in addition to private latters, he additionally sheds mild on Cabral the person. Politics, verse and private reflections intertwine and cross-fertilise on this fascinating, considerate image of a fancy soul – whose most distinguished cinematic presence thus far was as a tutelary spirit in Chris Marker’s experimental 1983 documentary Sans Soleil.

Fascinating, considerate image of a fancy soul 

Picked up by Odd Slice Movie Gross sales shortly earlier than its debut in IDFA’s Envision competitors, Amilcar seems to be set to attain extra competition engagements earlier than discovering a berth on a specialised streaming platform. Theatrical engagements might also comply with: the impressionistic location-shot bridging sequences that join the movie’s segments of archive footage give Amilcar an actual cinematic high quality, as does using a haunting recurrent musical theme, Earth Horns with Electrical Drone, by Japanese sound artist and Fluxus Group member Yoshi Wada.

Amilcar would make an excellent double invoice with Johan Grimonprez’s Oscar-nominated 2024 documentary Soundtrack To A Coup d’Etat. Each are portraits of pioneering anti-colonialist leaders who had been assassinated once they threatened current colonial energy blocs and the allies that profited from their plundering of African assets. Each work by exhuming a long-buried injustice in ways in which really feel contemporary. Eek offers us no narrative context for Amilcar’s movement of filmed archive materials and present-day footage of areas, aside from Cabral’s personal phrases and a pair of transient TV interviews. These stand in stark distinction with stories from the archives of the notorious Portuguese safety company PIDE, interleaved into the movement of the movie, on a person who the colonial authorities thought of to be a harmful subversive.

With an absence of xplanatory captions or voice-over narration, the one contextual pointers exterior of Cabral’s phrases (evocatively spoken by Cape Verdean filmmaker Nuno Miranda) and people PIDE stories are date and place titles, from the primary, ‘Island of Sao Vicente, Cape Verde, Portuguese Colony, 1943’, to the final, ‘Conakry, Guinea-Conakry, Unbiased Republic, 1973’. These unfamiliar with Portuguese colonial historical past could take some time to work out that the Atlantic islands of Cape Verde and the West African territory generally known as Guinea-Bissau had an umbilical connection created by shared Portuguese administration, pressured inhabitants trade and, traditionally, the slave commerce.

It was Cabral’s navigation of this colonial triangle, charted within the movie’s impressionistic first part, that cast his activism: born in Guinea-Bissau to Cape Verdean dad and mom, he moved with them again to Cape Verde when he was eight, witnessing firsthand the devastating results of a drought which the colonial rulers did nothing to alleviate. As a younger man Cabral sailed to Lisbon to review agronomy (he was the one black scholar in his class), and at last returned to the land of his beginning in 1952 to supervise an experimental agricultural station.

Cabral emerges as an idealist but in addition a pacesetter who may very well be ruthless: in a letter to his first spouse Maria Helena he talks about “eliminating” the leaders of insurgent factions within the resistance motion he based, earlier than including that he’s drained and desires to return to mattress. Elsewhere he’s in London at a convention; lauded by Castro in Havana; acquired by Ceausescu in Bucharest; hangs out with Olof Palme in Stockholm. It’s left to a different of these stark PIDE stories – that are introduced in silence on the display for us to learn and take up – to tell us that Cabral was, in 1966, in a relationship with a Cape Verdean girl, Ana Maria.

Eek withholds info {that a} extra typical biographical documentary would have positioned in tidy chronological order. We solely uncover Cabral has a daughter when he writes to inform her he loves her; later, he appears to have acquired a son too. There’s maybe some fence-sitting right here: as we solely have Cabral’s phrases to go on, we by no means know to what extent his absences had been egocentric, or how a lot emotional turmoil he left behind.

What we do get is a deep dive into the mindset of a person consumed by a mission whereas struggling to remain grounded. On the identical time, the intense future Cabral envisaged for Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and Africa comes throughout right here as a sort of dream imaginative and prescient, one that’s each inspiring and, like a lot of the archive footage right here, an unreachable relic of the previous.