AFRIKAMERA: NOME

Sana Na N’Hada 
France / Portugal / Angola 2023 I Original Version with English Subtitles I 118 min

NOME, the third feature film by Guinean filmmaker Sana Na N’Hada, uses intoxicating images to tell the story of the war of independence in the former Portuguese colony of Guinea-Bissau, which was liberated in 1974 after thirteen years of conflict.

After impregnating his cousin Nambú, the young Nome flees his village in the late 1960s for fear of disgrace and joins the guerrillas. After the war, he moved to Bissau to work as a government official. While exploiting his position for dubious business deals, he denies his village origins, betrays his comrades-in-arms and increasingly loses his connection to nature and the spiritual world. Eventually, Nome returns to his home village with new plans for the future…

Director Sana Na N’Hada, born in 1950, joined Amílcar Cabral’s Marxist guerrillas at the age of 16. As he was not fit to fight, he was soon sent to Cuba to train as a filmmaker together with four other young Guineans. When he returned to Guinea-Bissau in 1972, he tirelessly documented the struggle of his comrades and the first years of independence until 1977.
The flow of the narrative alternates between past, present and future and interweaves his own documentary 16 mm archive material with dream-like film images.
NOME premiered as part of the ACID selection at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival and was celebrated at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, not least for its visual language.