Origins and Production

In interviews about the film, you share that the project started around 12 years ago, when you decided to spend some time in Cape Verde and encountered the "figure" of Amílcar Cabral. You say that you started the research and the project by interviewing people who knew him or knew about him, but you discovered along the way that the form of the "interview" was not the right one for the film you wanted to make. Can you share with us how this process developed over the years? What were you really looking for?

Looking back, I realise that I wasn't really looking for Amílcar Cabral. I was looking for a way of understanding the world, and perhaps also myself.
The film was born during the economic crisis of 2012. At that moment my production company was struggling, television had stopped commissioning projects, and my partner and I decided to leave Spain for a while and move to Cape Verde. We lived a very simple life there. We walked a lot, cooked, read, wrote, spent long periods doing almost nothing. In retrospect, boredom became an essential creative condition. It slowed us down enough to become curious again. I didn't arrive in Cape Verde with the ambition of making a film about Cabral. It was much more modest than that. I simply became fascinated by this extraordinary figure who seemed strangely absent from European historical consciousness. Here was someone who had profoundly influenced anti-colonial struggles across Africa and yet remained almost invisible in Europe.
I wanted to know who he was. I started travelling between Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and Portugal, interviewing everyone I could find who had known him, fought with him, studied him or loved him. Little by little I accumulated more than forty interviews. At the time I thought I was building a film. Years later I realised I was actually building an archive.
The interviews were rich, but they all shared something: admiration. They described Cabral's intelligence, his charisma, his political vision. They helped me understand the historical figure, but they didn't allow me to experience him as a human being. I had information, but I didn't yet have cinema.That was probably the first major lesson of the project: curiosity can begin a film, but curiosity alone cannot sustain it. At some point you have to stop collecting answers and start asking different questions.

I must confess that I love your film; one can easily put it in the category of "Biopics", but it has such a brilliant way of bringing together a wide variety of formal choices in a very original way: poems, personal letters, pieces of diaries, public archives, re-enactment and contemporary analogue footage. You and your team did an amazing job. It might be a long answer, but can you tell us how you arrived at that?
Was that something you had already arrived at during the development and writing process, done with Alba Lombardia, or was that something you discovered later?

The honest answer is that I didn't design that structure from the beginning. It emerged because every previous version of the film failed. The first versions were much closer to a traditional historical documentary. They relied heavily on interviews and archival footage. They explained who Cabral was, what he did, why he mattered. Everything was perfectly logical. And yet something essential was missing. I realised that I admired Cabral, but I couldn't feel him.
The turning point came when I discovered his personal correspondence—especially the letters he wrote to his two wives—and his poems. Suddenly another person appeared. Not the revolutionary icon, but a man full of contradictions, doubts, tenderness, loneliness and desire. Those writings completely transformed my relationship with him. Until then I had been trying to explain Cabral. After reading those letters I became interested in something much more fragile: allowing myself to be challenged by him. From that moment on, the whole architecture of the film had to change.
The interviews became research. The archive was no longer simply illustrating history but entering into dialogue with intimate writings. The analogue images became less about reconstructing the past and more about expressing memory, absence and emotional proximity. Looking back, I think every formal decision came from the same question: not "How do we explain this man?" but "How do we create the conditions for the audience to encounter him?" That is a different kind of filmmaking.

Was it difficult to produce such a film?

It was probably the most difficult project I have ever worked on. Not only because it lasted more than ten years, but because the film kept changing its identity. In a way, we were constantly asking our producers and financiers to trust a film that we ourselves didn't fully understand yet. Looking back, I think the hardest part wasn't actually financing the film. It was protecting it from becoming a simpler film. There were many moments when we could have finished earlier by making a more conventional historical documentary. It probably would have been easier to explain, easier to finance and perhaps easier to distribute. But I increasingly felt that the complexity wasn't a problem to solve—it was the very subject of the film.
That required patience, trust and an extraordinary team of collaborators willing to embrace uncertainty.
I've also learned something important about authorship through this process. We often imagine the director as someone who knows where they're going. My experience was almost the opposite.
The film became possible because I surrounded myself with people who knew things I didn't know. Jacques Bidou challenged my sense of responsibility. Alba Lombardia helped me think about positionality and colonial perspectives. Federico Delpero transformed the editing into a space of thinking rather than simply assembling images. João Pedro embraced fragility instead of visual perfection. Elsa gave the film its emotional acoustic landscape. The older I get, the less I believe in the myth of the solitary auteur. I believe in conversations.
I believe films become better when they are made by people who gently but persistently challenge each other's certainties.

Was it a long archival research process? Can you also share something about that?

The archival research was probably the longest and loneliest part of the entire project.
For years, I did most of it on my own: contacting archives, travelling, writing emails and trying to understand what existed and where. The research happened in parallel with the production. It wasn't a separate phase. There were two main stages. During the long development period, I found roughly half of the archival material that eventually appears in the film. Those discoveries constantly reshaped the writing.
Then, once we secured financing, everything accelerated. We finally had the resources to continue the research, negotiate rights and access collections that had been out of reach. That was also when Alba Lombardia joined the project. After so many years working alone, she brought an invaluable sense of clarity and structure. She helped transform a huge collection of documents into something that could become a film.
But the biggest challenge wasn't finding the archive. It was learning how to look at it.
Many of the images were produced within colonial structures, so we kept asking ourselves: Can a colonial image become part of a decolonising film?I think it can—but it never stops reminding us where it comes from. We didn't use those images because they were innocent. We used them because, in many cases, they were the only images that existed. Learning to work with that contradiction became one of the central creative and ethical challenges of making Amílcar.