Duplacena

If there is one person Matthew Lancit can’t get out of his mind, it is his uncle Harvey. Dark rings around his eyes, pale, blind, his legs amputated. Like Harvey, the filmmaker also suffers from diabetes. He has the disease under control, but one question is always nagging at him: How much longer? His long-term (self-)observation reliably revolves around fears of infirmity and mutilation. He translates the feared body horror into film, stages himself as a zombie, vampire, a desolate figure. Lancit playfully anticipates his potential decline, serving up a whole arsenal of effects which – as video recordings prove – go back to his youth. It is not for nothing that the “dead” in the title is also reminiscent of “dad.” Because “Play Dead!” also negotiates his own role as a father.

Amid the aftermath of Mozambique’s civil war, I visit my grandmother, confronting fading memories and blurred lines between truth and fiction. A former rebel’s presence in the village echoes the relentless ghosts of war, mirroring the tensions of my generation.

A volcanic eruption, an act of faith, the empire re-enacted in the Cavalhadas de São Pedro and the technologies of nature monitoring intertwine in a non-reductionist gesture of synthesis.

Mozambique 1974 - the European name of the capital Lourenço Marques was deleted and replaced by Maputo. Between the delicacy and the apocalyptic, Brisa Solar reveals the little secrets of an African city that was born from a modernist dream, which led a revolution and which today sees its cultural heritage and threatened by Chinese capitalism.