The film, which was part of the IndieLisboa festival in 2020, crosses a century of Portuguese cinema, in which colonialism has been approached both from a fictional and a documentary perspective.
Ariel Bigault puts two African actors, the Angolan Orlando Sérgio and the Sao Tomean Ângelo Torres, in dialogue with directors and researchers, in a reflection on how colonialism and decolonization were recorded on film.
In a press release, the director says that "the view of the colonies has changed", from the narrative constructed by the Estado Novo of "coexistence between colonizers and colonized" to the post-April 25 period, which "remained silent, because nobody wanted to talk about this colonial past.
"This long and complex history, these memories and imaginaries, are common heritage and deserve to be discovered, or rediscovered," says the director.
"Ghosts of the Empire" also counts with the participation of several directors who have dealt with this theme, namely Fernando Matos Silva, Margarida Cardoso, and Ivo M. Ferreira, and also with the director of the Cinemateca Portuguesa, José Manuel Costa, and researcher Maria do Carmo Piçarra.
Ariel de Bigault was born in France, but for over three decades her work has been in the universe of Lusophony, between Portugal, Brazil, and Africa.
She is the author of the documentary series "Eclats noirs du samba" (1987), in which she researches the Afro-Brazilian artistic creation, with the participation of names such as Gilberto Gil, Zezé Motta, and Paulo Moura.
He also wrote anthologies of music from Cape Verde and Angola and made the documentaries "Afro Lisboa" (1996) and "Margem Atlântica" (2006).
