A Swiss director with Portuguese heritage, Basil Da Cunha takes a musical journey through multicultural Lisbon in Manga D’Terra, which world premieres this week at Locarno Film Festival.
Following After The Night (2013) and The End of the World (2019), Da Cunha’s third feature is another bittersweet love letter to Reboleira, the historically poor but rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood where the director has lived and made films for the past 15 years. The area is renowned for its large immigrant population and abundant music, particularly from the West African island republic of Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony.
In his press notes for Manga D’Terra, Da Cunha lays out his mission to preserve the sights, sounds and faces of Reboleira on film before the relentless march of capitalism sanitises and erases them. In doing so, he has created a hybrid of gritty social-realist ensemble drama and unorthodox movie musical, light on narrative substance but full of delicious songs, colourful characters and handsome neon-drenched visuals. Refreshingly, he finds beauty, kindness, humour and resilience here alongside crime, violence and poverty. Festivals and specialist outlets with particular interest in musical subjects, immigration stories and African diaspora culture will likely show the keenest interest.
In his previous features, Da Cunha concentrated on Reboleira’s male characters: mostly drug dealers, gangsters and ex-convicts, all hustling to survive. Driven almost entirely by women of colour, Manga D’Terra is partly a conscious attempt to redress this gender imbalance, with strong focus on the feisty matriarchs and tough earth mothers who often hold the social fabric together in ghetto areas. These are women wrestling not just with deprivation, racism and police brutality but also with feckless, unreliable menfolk. Da Cunha finds great sparkly energy in these all-female scenes, with salty language and juicy insults flying in a mix of Creole and Portuguese. If nothing else, Manga D’Terra passes the Bechdel Test many times over.
The young woman at the heart of Manga D’Terra is Rosa (Eliana Rosa), nicknamed Rosinha, a 20-year-old aspiring singer who has left Cape Verde for Lisbon to try and earn money to help raise the two young children she left behind. Settling in Reboleira, she lands an exploitative low-wage job working for grouchy, bullying cafe manager Nunha (Nunha Gomes). As a glamorous young beauty, Rosa also draws attention from local men, from the sweetly persistent to the sinister and sleazy. A naturally gifted singer, she quickly becomes a hit on the local party scene, but her talent and looks inevitably attract predatory creeps seeking sexual favours in return for career opportunities.
Depicted as an implausibly sweet, sexless, fresh-faced innocent abroad, the character of Rosa veers a little too close to Manic Pixie Dream Girl fantasy at times. Da Cunha gives her a thinly explained back story involving a dead husband, but not much in the way of personality, worldly street smarts or psychological shading. Fortunately, Rosa the actor has enough laidback charisma and easy screen presence to make this spare character sketch into something more realistically dimensional. She also has an aura of pop-star glamour, but crucially not too polished, so she does not look out of place in the crumbling streets of Reboleira.
A mellifluous fusion of blues and jazz, folk and fado, plus distinctive Cape Verdean styles like morna and coladeira, Rosa’s musical performances are a key selling point here. Spontaneously breaking into song as she wanders through neon-lit back streets or rubble-strewn wastelands, she elevates Manga D’Terra beyond its default documentary-style naturalism into a kind of dreamlike Jacques Demy-esque fantasia. Da Cunha’s love letter to the soul of a dying neighbourhood may have slender characters and a slight plot, but these musical vignettes also ensure it has a winning charm and a warm-blooded humanity.
Director, screenwriter, editing: Basil Da Cunha
Cast: Eliana Rosa, Nunha Gomes, Evandro Pereira, Lucinda Brito, Vera Semedo
Producers: Palmyre Badinier, Nicolas Wadimoff
Cinematography: Patrick Tresch
Music: Eliana Rosa, Henrique Silva, Luis Firmino
Production company: Akka Films (Switzerland)
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Corso Internazionale)
96 minutes
In Creole, Portuguese
