The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder

Thirty-two years after the end of Mozambique’s civil war, in which a million people died, the smell of terror still hangs in the air. As a child, Inadelso Cossa was shielded from the cruel reality. Now he visits the village of his youth with his sound recordist Moises in a sensory search for the ghosts of the past.

Conversations with villagers—including his grandmother, who has dementia, and a former rebel, who drinks to forget—are punctuated by shots of family photos strewn among the leaves or an empty chair against the same background.

In a personal voice-over, Cossa reflects on the past, and how it resonates in the present, casting a shadow over the future. The memories he encounters are sometimes faded, fictionalized or distorted, and past and present seem to merge, especially in the dark of the night.

In this dream-like atmosphere, Cossa, who previously evoked his country’s violent past in A Memory in Three Acts (2016), now creates a penetrating, poetic ode to a people marked by collective trauma.