Inadelso Cossa, a Mozambican filmmaker and producer, is known for Xilunguine, a terra prometida (2011), As Noites Ainda Cheiram a Pólvora (2024), and The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder (2024). The filmmaker is known for his inventive films that explore acts of memory. The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder is a documentary premiered at the Berlinale’s Forum section in 2024. It explores the issues of war, and personal and collective memory in a compelling way through a juxtaposition of the spoken and the unspoken and remembering and forgetting. The documentary is expository and features interviews as a dominant element of its narration and structure. The interview and characters’ responses form a coherent narrative and plot while their war experiences are the motif and driving force of the story.

The film is a recollection of traumatizing wartime experiences and the insidious nature of the trauma that has been etched deep into everyday existence in the postwar era. Although the war has ended, The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder relives the postwar ruins, disruptions, loss, and lingering trauma of survivors. The characters embody memory and are also used to interrogate what is remembered or forgotten. On one hand, Cossa Macuacua and Zalina demonstrate with clarity their recollection of the past while Cossa’s grandmother, Elisa, is an unreliable narrator because of how she mixed up events. Like Zalina, Cossa’s friend’s narration is psychotic as he reveals he hears the dead from their graves and moves around the bush with recording equipment in an attempt to record their voices. Irrespective of the varying validity of their narrations, all the characters are cast as traumatic. Cossa reveals to his friend that: “I have been having nightmares too. I can’t sleep at night. I hear voices and more voices, my grandfather’s voices. I see figures but I don’t recognise their faces. I hear footsteps at night. Someone knocks on the door, I open it and there’s no one there.”

The film succinctly reveals and dramatizes the impact of war without engaging the politics or causes of the war in detail. Cossa’s refusal to inject the civil war that took place in Mozambique from 1977 to 1992 as the background of the film is his attempt at remaining an apolitical artist whose concern is to offer unofficial narrative to challenge the government’s official narrative of the war. A political perspective may have undermined the artistic dramatization of his subject: postwar trauma and disruptions. He however focused on the shared trauma of the soldiers and their victims and neither situated the narrative in Mozambique nor explained who the FRELIMO or RENAMO as mentioned by the characters are.

Cossa’s technique in the film is in sync with the subject matter. The film is dominantly shot through close-ups that reveal the characters’ emotions. Most of the scenes are symbolically shot in the night to buttress anxiety and the gloomy nature of the film’s mood. The night scenes are dominant with dark frames with a patch of circled light where the characters are framed. The camera zooms in on the characters and often casts them as aloof with distant gazes that are torn between the present and the past. The establishing scene’s image of a dead man and a traumatized young woman silently weeping over the dead body, followed by the scene of a group of soldiers on rampage and the destruction that trails the soldiers set the tense mood of the film. As the characters emerge in the film, Cossa introduces them with their prewar pictures thereby inviting the viewer to contrast the lush prewar images with their postwar old and frail present.

What can be described as the beginning of the film’s denouement is the scene of a child running in an open field with arms stretched like wings, which symbolizes the freedom that comes with the end of the war and the birth of a new postwar generation. As the boy runs around, an old woman in static posture watches him. The war may have rendered her immobile but even with the uncertainties that have become their daily postwar experience; there is hope in the freedom that the next generation exudes.