The Murmuring Coast / A Costa dos Murmúrios

End of the 60’s in Lourenço-Marques. Eva arrives in the Mozambican capital to marry her fiancé, a lieutenant in the Portuguese army. Locked in the oppressive lock-up of officers’ wives, she escapes to venture into the colonial city fraught with social and political tensions. And finds out what the war has done to her husband.

The Murmuring Coast is adapted from the homonymous novel of Lidia Jorge who, like Margarida, lived in Mozambique during the war. The deadly violence that remains out of sight undermines relations within the small community of soldiers “This violence, which the men bring from the front, is then projected on their women.”  When they try to break codes and conventions, they find themselves cloistered in male oppression. Absurdity and cruelty take over everyone’s privacy, destroy friendships and loyalties, and are inexorably fatal. Margarida Cardoso composes her shots in time and space, and stages her characters surrounded in the perspectives of the sets. The filmmaker does not limit herself to denouncing the lies and follies of this stunted and unhealthy microcosm. She stresses the impossibility of meetings with Africans, held on the margins: “they were extras in the colonial city.”

« As soon as I started making films, I wanted to explore my relationship with this past in Africa. I wanted to scrutinize something terrible that I didn’t really understand as a child. It’s that mystery that drives me towards these countries. » Margarida Cardoso