Mud, Water, Dog, Path, Tree, Sky, Vultures, Blood, Fire

Abstract

The visual essay I am presenting here is a minor detour from a larger project I have been involved in for the past seven years. That larger project is a documentary film co-authored with Catarina Laranjeiro, which focusses on a specific time frame within the microhistory of Unal, a Balanta community from the south of Guinea-Bissau. The title of our film is Fire in the Mud (Fogo no Lodo) and it evokes various local personal experiences of the war that swept the territory, today known as Guinea-Bissau, between 1963 and 1974. Depending on their background, people usually call this war The National Liberation War or The Colonial War.