Director’s note

Why Maputo

Between 1996 and 2008, Mozambique has recorded the highest economic growth percentage in the African continent. This rapid growth is profoundly changing the country, modifying the habits and lifestyles. People move from the countrysides to the cities, in particular Maputo, the capital that now represent a future of hope and wealth.

Leaving from a country in economic crisis such as Italy, the intent was to understand how people lived in a country where the hope for the future is part of the daily struggle, how is the life in the metropolitan Africa, so little-known ny western people. The intent wasn’t to tell about Africa of villages and countrysides, hunters and lion, wars and dictatures, but  Africa made of traffic jam, money, villas and slums. What I found was a chaotic cosmos, seemingly meaningless but full of poetry and life. In Maputo, you simply live.

Be careful, I don’t want to tell the tale of the poor and sick but happy African: in Maputo you live basically very bad, too. And you die very easily. So much as some of the characters who appear in the film are no longer among us.

And then there’s Mambucho, the narrator, around which the documentary revolves: he is really a director and is currently shooting his low-budget film among immense problems. Our stories are similar, in some way or another: he’s making a fiction movie about a real and dramatic problem (AIDS) and I made a documentary in which him is the only actor.

Félix Mambucho (on the right) and Nelson Faquir, our sound guy

 Acting

As I was saying, Mambucho is the only actor of the film, the narrator: an african storyteller who speaks in the middle of an empty bullring, but it also play himself.  Once we obtained the permission to film in the arena, I told him “ok, let’s talk about problems in Maputo” and basically the bigger part of the shooting is  improvisation.

Filming

The project was, of course, a low-budget one, so I worked with a very small “troupe”: we were three. Me, at the camera, the sound guy Nelson Faquir and the producer Timi Gaspari. Actually Faquir was not only the sound guy, but a very smart and indispensable production assistant, he knows perfectly Maputo and he managed perfectly every situation,  like, after all, Timi Gaspari, who wasn’t just the producer of this film, but also the contact point between me and Africa. Without these two people the film would never been made. For giving you an idea of how much they were efficient: the day we were going to film in the arena (that is actually an abandoned place in the centre of the city), a guy shown up, with other people, pretending to be the owner of the place and brought us to his “office” (that was a tiny room in the arena with a desk covered with staks of passports) and he said: “The day’s rental is 900 US dollars”. When we went out the office we paid 50 euros. This for giving you an idea of their ability but also of the tight circumstances in which the film was made.