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A COSTA DOS MURMURIOS / MURMURING COAST
Year2004 length 115' colour 35 mm Country Portugal
directed by Margarida Cardoso
First Feature Film
Cast Beatriz Batarda (Evita), Filipe Duarte (Luis), Monica Calle (Helena), Adriano Luz (Forza Leal)
Screenplay Margarida Cardoso, Cédric Basso
Cinematography Lisa Hagstrand
Editing Pedro Marquez
Art Direction Augusto Mayer
Music Bernardo Sassetti
Producers Maria João Mayer, François d’Artemare
Production Filmes do Tejo, Les films de l’après-midi
World Rights
Filmes do Tejo
Av. da Libertade, 85 - 3°
1250-140 Lisboa (Portugal)
Tel. +35 121 323 4400 Fax +35 121 347 1087
Press office
Maria João Mayer, Mobile + 351 91 9365759
François d'Artemare, Mobile + 351 91 9996494
synopsis
At the end of the sixties, Evita (Beatriz Batarda) arrives in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique to marry Luis (Filipe Duarte), a mathematics student doing his military service there.
Evita soon realize that Luis has changed, and in the turmoil of the war he has transformed hmself into a pale imitation of his commanding officer, Forza Leal (Adriano Luz).
The men leave on a major military offensive in the north of the country.
Evita is left alone and, desperate to understand what has changed Luis, seeks the company of Helena (Monica Calle), Forza Leal’s wife. Helena, submissive and humiliated, is a prisoner in her own house where she is fulfilling a promise. And it is she who shows Luis’s darkest side to Evita, as she tries to draw her into an ambiguous relationship of destruction and death. Lost in a alien world, Evita becomes tangled in a web of sordid violence, which has neither glory nor honour. The violence of a colonial age drawing to this end.
Voyages into a country’s memory, especially memories of its people, are complex experiences which are usually entrusted to those with direct experience of the events being remembered. It is, therefore, particularly surprising and fascinating that such a controversial and painful event in Portugal’s modern history should be chosen by a young author who, in this film, tells the story with a strong and distinct female sensibility. Seen from the inside of a community under siege and narrated as the diary of the discovery of the mysteries of a distant and omnipresent Africa, the film is Margarida Cardoso’s first feature length work. It is the portrayal of a collective impotence: to understand, to interact and to face the imminence of history. It is the description of not only the end of colonialism, but also the end of a dream which precipitates into a nightmare.
Giorgio Gosetti
director's statement
The Murmuring Coast is the free adaptation of the same-titled novel by portuguese author Lídia Jorge.
Mine is a very personal relationship with the novel, because the story takes place in a time and place that mirror my own childhood: the 60s. An African colonial town. A shore. An hotel filled with military personnel and their families. A distant war. The routine and hypocritical normality af a forgotten country living its forgotten war. These were perilous and extremely violent times, a violence that was almost domestic, that was (and still is...) brought down on the weak, women, blacks, animals...
This is the violence I wanted to talk about, of the breeze from a gloryless, honourless, and petty past that, to me is the perfect metaphor for the colonial times that are nearing their end.
For those of us, who lived in these times, all is left is a feeling of things left unsaid and of guilt. For those who didn’t experience them there is nothing...
Margarida Cardoso
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