VERDICT: Filipa César and Sónia Vaz Borges explore the decolonising power of education in this tale of rebellious scholarship in the tangle of Guinea-Bissau’s mangrove swamps.
During the 1960s and 70s, a militant independence movement called the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) rebelled against Portuguese rule in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. In her exceptional 2017 feature Spell Reel, filmmaker Filipa César celebrated the concurrent flourishing of Guinean cinema inspired by the liberation leader, Amílcar Cabral. César’s new short, Mangrove School, made in collaboration with local historian and activist Sónia Vaz Borges, addresses a different, but connected, element of Cabral’s decolonisation project; the education of his people.
This education project was a staggering undertaking, attempting to tackle the conditioned colonial mindsets of the populace while being targeted by enemy firepower. The initiative consisted of nomadic classrooms contrived amidst the knotted roots of the mangrove trees that famously line the country’s coastline, letting them remain hidden from the spying eyes of recognisance aircraft. The film’s visuals rarely leave the cover of this setting, at first observing people utilising the trees as resources before re-staging some of the lectures delivered beneath the canopy with local children. These re-enactments are accompanied by audio recollections that fill in historical context and colourful detail.
Perhaps the masterstroke by César and Borges, however, is the decision to make the mangroves themselves the primary focus. Almost as much time is spent with the camera trained on their interlocking roots as it is on anything else. They serve all manner of allegorical and metaphorical purposes: from representing the resilience of the Guinean people to challenging geographical delineation in the betweenness of their liminal residence, neither in the ocean nor on the shore. All of this gradually builds a strange power, exemplified by an early image of a hand appearing from beneath the murky water and grabbing onto a protruding root – as though their composition encourages ghosts to clamber back out of the watery past. In Mangrove School the trees aren’t just a physical sanctuary but a material and a medium for rebirth.
