The Hero by Zézé Gamboa (review)

Zézé Gamboa is Angola’s most famous film director. His recent O Grande Kilapy (The Big Scheme), a roguish look at the revolutionary era, represents the first dramatic film to reach international audiences from the country in almost a decade. But O Grande Kilapy owes much to an earlier film that presented a more staid view of the postindependence state. His poignant and charming O Herói (The Hero, 2004) opened a window into post–civil war society and the social decay and familial disruption produced by three decades of conflict. In contrast to his historical drama, this earlier film is a realistic if hopeful look at how individuals accommodate the dislocations of war and rebuild their lives amid the rubble of contemporary Angola.

O Herói centers on the lives of three characters: Vitório (Oumar Makena Diop), Judite (Maria Ceiça), and Manu (Milton Coelho). Vitório, the eponymous title character, lost his leg to a landmine as a government sergeant. Outfitted with a prosthetic, he is hindered by his disability in his search for work in the recovering postwar capital. Despondent, he attempts to drink away his problems and ends up in an alley where he awakens to find his new leg missing. This destitute life leads him next to Judite, a prostitute with whom he begins an uncertain relationship. Meanwhile, Manu, an orphaned youth prone to petty crime, trades a stolen radio for a different prosthetic leg. The characters’ paths become increasingly intertwined as Vitório seeks to obtain a replacement prosthesis, which brings him to Manu’s compassionate teacher, Joana (the Portuguese television star Patricia Bull), and her influential Western-educated boyfriend.

The film’s parallel structure shows the different layers of Angolan society, while the symbol of the lost prosthesis slowly unites the characters. Personal histories illustrate the bleak realities produced by the war, which are reinforced by the oligarchic and self-interested rule of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA). Location shooting in Luanda further highlights the degradation of the country and economy. The characters struggle against the emotive backdrops of ruined warplanes, urban ghettos, and the discordantly pleasant haunts of the local elites. The abilities of the characters to improve their lives are limited by these legacies of impoverishment and the rigidities of class structure in Angola. The protagonists confront their individual losses and begin to rebuild their lives, if not exactly in the ways they initially desired.

O Herói is in essence an optimistic response to a specific place and time. Gamboa began his career with Angolan television and transitioned into documentary filmmaking. He established the idea for his first feature during the short armistice of the early 1990s, but the resumption of the Angolan civil war delayed production until after 2002. In response to decades of conflict, he wrote and directed a film that repudiates Angola’s history of waste and destruction. Violence appears mainly in the form of flashbacks, while characters dismiss military trappings as relics. Gamboa recognizes and dramatizes the destruction of war primarily through its legacies, in which shared trauma creates a kind of communal identity. In so doing, O Herói distances itself from Luanda’s more popular cinematic fare, which privileges low-budget action. Instead, the film reflects what Martin Mhando and Keyan Tomaselli have termed “Truth and Reconciliation” filmmaking” (“Africa Speaks to Itself through Truth and Reconcilation Films,” Black Camera, An International Film Journal 1 [1], 2009). The search for social connections in a fragmented postcolonial society and the importance of self-affirmation following social collapse echo larger regional themes, as can be seen, for example, in João Ribeiro’s film From the Ashes (1999) about Mozambique. O Herói attempts to spur discussion by confronting the nation’s lived experiences and provides a dramatic model for communal emancipation from individual suffering. With its view of personal striving and positive resolution, it places itself firmly in the “African affirmative...