Guerilla Grannies: How to Live in This World by Ike Bertels (review)

As a student, Ike Bertels saw a film that would shape her career. The 1971 documentary Behind the Lines of the British solidarity activist Margaret Dickinson profiled the freedom fighters of FRELIMO, including a cadre of young women who had taken up arms against Portugal’s colonial empire. For Bertels the film launched a journey to find and understand these women. The result of this quest is her first feature-length documentary, Guerilla Grannies, which captures the strength, compassion, and conviction of the three now elderly women who inspired a young Dutch filmmaker forty years ago.

The three women—Amelia Omar, Monica Chitupila, and Maria Sulila—united to fight Portuguese colonialism before charting their own paths in postindependence Mozambique. Bertels chronicles their lives through a series of interviews conducted in 1984, on the eve of free elections in 1994, and most recently in 2011. Amelia entered the war as a teenager shortly after having her first child. She now makes a living from the proceeds of her farm supplemented by a pension, but she worries about her son’s laziness even as she celebrates her educated daughter’s accomplishments. Maria was the ambitious one, attaining the rank of captain and working abroad during the civil war. Having recently experienced a stroke, she lives in Maputo with her son, a bank manager, who credits his mother with helping him achieve a comfortable life. Monica remained in FRELIMO the longest, serving in the Central Committee. Now retired, she raised her children to celebrate revolutionary principles but laments the technocratic direction of the government and the listlessness of her grandson’s generation.

The lives of these three women provide dramatic testimony to the ideals behind independence and FRELIMO’s uneven accomplishments since taking power. Through careful editing, the film sensitively contrasts the opinions of the young revolutionaries to those held by their older, more world-weary selves. Generally the women seem content with gender advances and the state of education, but they are less sanguine about the political and economic state of the country. Nonetheless, they remain devoted to the party in which they fought, because it has improved the country and provided their children with opportunities that did not exist under Portuguese rule. Filmed with straightforward elegance and a commitment to preserving the voices of its subjects, Guerilla Grannies is a remarkable document of how three principled women understand the trajectory of their lives in the globalized context of postcolonial Mozambique.

Bertels’s documentary recognizes the unfulfilled promises of FRELIMO, yet in its celebration of the values of these women and their personal strength, it resembles older films of the revolutionary era. Geurilla Grannies reminds us of the party’s dual struggle for equality against the forces of colonialism and chauvinist tradition, while also celebrating the older generation’s belief in the emancipatory power of education. Even as elderly women, Amelia, Monica, and Maria appear as willful agents of change and inspire those around them. Their collective story recalls older documentaries like Robert Van Lierop’s A Luta Continua (1971), which examined the ideas and fighters guiding the anticolonial struggle. In contrast, recent films like Licinio Azevedo’s Virgem Margarida (2012) and CNN’s well-intentioned if problematic Mozambique or Bust (2013) focus on the social failures of FRELIMO and the victimization of Mozambican women. Certainly, themes of female empowerment are present in Mozambican productions like O Jardim de Outro Homem (2007), but Guerilla Grannies connects them to the party and its combatants in a way that has disappeared from the public consciousness.

This depiction of revolutionary women and their feelings of dislocation and disappointment within contemporary society reflects a surprisingly common narrative in the filmmaking of poststruggle African states. A dramatic parallel is offered by Ingrid Sinclair’s Flame (1996), in which former soldiers lament that their contributions have not been fully appreciated or integrated into their independent nations. Flora Gomes’s early work...