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The debut feature of Margarida Cardoso is a beautifully nuanced film about love, power, subordination and pride.
Young bride Evita arrives in an African colony coastal town to spend her honeymoon with Luis, who's stationed there as part of his Portuguese national service. The day she arrives, some corpses wash up on the shore of this 1960s' tropical haven, but because the dead are black, their colonial masters care little. To Evita the corpses symbolise the rotten state of the dying Portuguese empire. And she soon begins to realise her disappointment that the sensitive mathematician she married is now a committed colonialist, whose views on the situation are in stark contrast to her own. Luis' long absences in the field do nothing to ease the emotional pressure and the sense that her dream is collapsing. For her own sake she must do something: but what'
With masterful control, Cardoso creates a dense and haunting portrayal of the fading, grasping demise of colonialism and its personal consequences.
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D Margarida Cardoso P Maria Joao Mayer, Francois d'Artemare S Cedric Basso, Margarida Cardoso L Portuguese w/English subtitles WS Insomnia World Sales TD 35mm/col/2004/120mins
Margarida Cardoso was born in Portugal in 1963. Her films include [Two Dragons] (1996, short), [Natal 71] (1999), [Among Us] (1999, short).
