The starting point for this “hip hop opera”, as its creator, Isis Hembe, describes it, was the launch in 2017 of Angola’s first satellite – Angosat – which disappeared into space.
In the film, Isis Hembe plays the character Man Ré, an Angolan scientist who “goes into space in search of intelligent life”.
“[There] he begins to reflect on the need to find intelligent life within us”, the musician, poet and activist told Lusa.
“The Adventures of Angosat” began as a play and was turned into a film by Marc Serena, a Catalan journalist and author of award-winning documentaries such as “Tchindas” and “The Writer of a Country Without Bookstores”.
Angolan artist Resem Verkron, who is part of the street art collective Verkron and has worked on short films such as "Lola & Mami" about toxic masculinity, is co-director of this 34-minute film, which takes place on the streets of Cazenga (Luanda), to the sound of urban beats mixed with quissanje, an Angolan musical instrument.
Speaking to Lusa, Isis Hembe highlighted that the film shows a world where diversity “is taken into account and is seen as a resource to be used”, reflecting Angola, which is also made up of several “different cultures, sensibilities and bodies”, as a result of its history.
Like Isis Hembe, who uses a wheelchair, most of the film's cast is made up of people with different abilities, such as urban dancer Scott Suave, who lost an arm and a leg in an accident but continues to dance.
Hembe had polio as a child, but was unable to receive proper treatment because of the Angolan civil war, which devastated the country for almost three decades, between 1975 and 2002.
Isis Hembe stresses that difference “must be taken into account in the construction of this collective space that we call Angola” and hopes that the film will also be seen as “a political project of inclusion of otherness”, to which society will respond positively.
The film is spoken in several languages, including dialogues in Angolan sign language, the main means of communication for two of the actors (Celeste Wacalenda and Domingos Malebo), and a version of the popular song Umbi-umbi, sung in Umbundu, the most widely spoken indigenous language in Angola.
After its world premiere on 18 May at the Maysles Cinema in Harlem, at the New York African Film Festival, with a Q&A session with Isis Hembe himself, the film will be released in Portugal on 7 June at FEStin, the itinerant Portuguese-language film festival held in Lisbon and showing productions from nine countries in the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries.
The national premiere is scheduled for 20 June in a free screening at Cine São Paulo, one of the largest cinemas in the city of Luanda.
