Forms of Self-Inscription in Contemporary African Cinema: The Case of Mozambican Cinema

Abstract

This article examines how contemporary Mozambican cinema produces counter-hegemonic images of “national representation” and of Mozambique’s recent history in the films of Inadelso Cossa, Lara Sousa, and Yara Costa. It analyses, through the work of these three filmmakers, images that invite a reconsideration of Mozambique in relation to memory, history, and identity. By expanding the notion of Mozambican cinema and including films produced during the colonial war period, this study aims to deepen understanding of how Mozambican cinema revisits, elaborates, and interrogates the legacy, experience, and aesthetics emerging from the years of the Instituto Nacional de Cinema (National Film Institute). The institute’s dissolution in 1991 marked both the conclusion of revolutionary or liberation cinema (Andrade-Watkins, 1995) and the end of the State-led model of film production in Mozambique, which subsequently required reconfiguration. Accordingly, this study investigates how contemporary Mozambican cinema inscribes images of the country from positions of displacement, fragmentation, and incompleteness, where memory becomes a contested and creative field, and self-inscription functions as a gesture of epistemic sovereignty. The analysis offers an aesthetic reading of contemporary Mozambican films Memória em Três Actos (Memory in Three Acts; 2017), Fin (The End; 2017), and The Crossing (2014), to understand how these works challenge the legacy of the National Film Institute and the revolutionary project of the Liberation Front of Mozambique. This analysis is inspired by the essay “As Formas Africanas de Auto-Inscrição” (African Forms of Self-Inscription) by philosopher Achille Mbembe (2001).