Flora Gomes, Filmmaker in Search of a Nation

Through technology, migration, and circulation of images, global capitalism continues to redefine ideas of national or regional space. Thus, the concept and the practice of national cinema appear increasingly questionable. Yet Flora Gomes, the leading director from Guinea-Bissau, is one African filmmaker in whose work the idea of national cinema remains central, if by that term we mean the coalescence in the cinematic form of a personal artistic style and the sociopolitical realities of a country. Gomes relates to Guinea-Bissau with something that approximates political identification. By focusing on three of Gomes’s films—Mortu Nega, Udju Azul di Yonta, and Nha Fala—this essay examines the travails of national identity in a sociopolitical context at once historically specific and penetrated by the circulation of deterritorialized images. In these films, Gomes shuttles between an interest in the nationalist project set forth by the revolution in the country and an acknowledgement of generational and demographic changes (represented by the youth culture of fashion and music). Far from suggesting an opportunistic pandering to the prestige of the dominant culture, the essay argues that this shuttling between historical memory and youthful desire for self-expression provides a rich space in which the agenda of a national cinema may coexist with the transnational imaginary integral to global capital.