BUALA

A chicken on a donkey wanting to go to the beach

The film’s fertile terrain lies in the interstitial spaces between li (here) and lá (there), in the liminal lives and livelihoods, between memory and present, between those who arrived and those born here but carrying another land with them, between a country that calls itself modern and the persistence of underserved informal settlements that persist — despite decades of promises of dignified and universal rehousing — as mirages on the periphery. Rather than an ethnographic outsider’s look, Ali, Aqui proposes a wandering story told from within, a community fiction rather than a docu-drama, based on the rhythms, languages, emotions, textures, pains, and humours of those who inhabit the community.

Afroscreen

17.11.2025 | by Pedro José-Marcellino aka P.J. Marcellino