Film Screening: A Memory in Three Acts + The Dead Tell No Tales
May 6
Inadelso Cossa is a Mozambican film director, cinematographer, producer, and the founder of 16mmFILMES, an independent film and television company based in Mozambique. His work explores different phases of Africa’s, particularly Mozambique’s, history from a personal perspective. Investigating the Colonial, Post Colonial, Independence, and Post Civil War periods, Cossa finds it his duty to document what he refers to as ‘acts of memory.’
Inadelso’s first feature length documentary, A Memory in Three Acts, delves into Mozambique’s struggle for independence from Portugal and the lasting memories of those affected by the war. It was selected for the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam’s (IDFA, 2016) First Appearance Competition. Since then, it has been shown at festivals such as Goteborg (2017), IndieLisboa (2017), Durban International Film Festival (2017), Nuremberg International Human Rights Film Festival (2017), Zanzibar International Film Festival (2018), among others. The film also won the Special Jury Award at the Zanzibar International Film Festival (2018).
Inadelso is currently working on his first fiction project, Karingana – The Dead Tell No Tales, and a documentary called The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder, which has been selected by the IDFA Bertha Fund and awarded with a development grant from the Atlas Workshops, a program in the Marrakech International Film Festival (2018). The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder deals with a filmmaker’s fragmented memories of his childhood in Mozambique during the Civil War.
This lecture is a collaboration with Graham M. Jones and the MIT Anthropology Program, with support from the MIT History Program, and MISTI-Africa.
Respondents:
M. Amah Edoh, Assistant Professor of African Studies at MIT. Her research takes as its focus the circulation of material and visual objects across West Africa and Europe to interrogate the production of Africa as a category of thought. Edoh has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Togo and the Netherlands.
Kenda Mutongi, Professor of History at MIT. Mutongi teaches a wide range of courses in African history, world history, and gender history. She has been an MLK Visiting Professor of History at MIT, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Amsterdam.
Prior to the lecture, there will be a screening of Inadelso’s films A Memory in Three Acts (64 minutes) and The Dead Tell No Tales (10 minutes) in Bartos Theatre, beginning at 4pm.
Part of the Spring 2019 Lecture Series: The Digital Hum of the Long, Slow Now
This lecture series is made possible with the generous support of The Council for the Arts at MIT (CAMIT)
