Lagos

Memory, cinema and reparation: interview with Dulce Fernandes about Tales of Oblivion

There was also a clear intention of appropriation of the archives, especially the written sources. As Saidiya Hartman points out, for enslaved people, the archive is always an encounter with violence: they appear in the records only when they are bought, shipped or landed. It is never they who leave behind their own writings or their version of the story. It is always the oppressor, the enslaver, who writes. Therefore, this file is inevitably contaminated by this historical violence, and still existing on the present day. But I felt that I had the right to make it my own, to take from it whatever served the film’s purpose: to tell this story in a free, expanded and contemplative way.

Face to face

20.04.2026 | by Marta Lança

Tales of oblivion (or of our shameless lists)

These names are part of a list, whose same logic inspired another list composed of the names of several children from a Portuguese public school to be read by the Portuguese (neo) colonial-fascist party in Parliament, which exposed these same children to hatred and violence (in Portugal as in Palestine). The list I have partly copied above is a document, perhaps a list of those arriving in a slave ship, which the Portuguese filmmaker Dulce Fernandes included in her latest film, Tales of Oblivion.