The films of Welket Bungué highlight the urgency of speech. Being reasonably familiar with the artist’s output, I have always pondered the fact that Welket works quickly and incessantly. Drawing on my research practice in Black cinema, I can relate this directly to something Zózimo Bulbul said when asked about the length of his film Abolição: “I never know if it’s the last time I will make a film, so, whenever I make one, I try to include all of the questions troubling me at that moment.”

Besides being a filmmaker, Welket, like Zózimo, is a Black person, and his films cannot be separated from his body, which is why I began by referring to the urgency of speech.

The films that make up this screening share an existential space: the experience of Black people — from its denial to its celebration.

In some cultures, death is akin to life, and this is also present in the art and intellectual worlds. I switch now to a viewing of the film I Am Not Pilatus, which considers violence and the denial of Black people’s humanity in Portugal.

The film is shot through the subjective gaze of the character entirely with smartphones, as if they were hidden cameras installed in the streets to monitor and punish.

The idea of filming racism from the perspective of the racist is cinematically ingenious, and the director is able to distance himself from the theme, although it is very present to him, by demonstrating the thesis that racism is a problem created and sustained by the racist.

The film deconstructs the concept of race through the gaze of the onlooker who hopes for emancipation and the gaze of a realisation that is affronting in that it limits the concept of homeland and nationality.

The lives of Portuguese people have always been conditioned by propaganda film in many different ways, so that what decolonial cinema proposes is also the re-education of the addicted gaze of the masses. Both I Am Not Pilatus and Upheaval operate in this decolonising field in the sense of re-educating the oppressor mentality, one in a more sarcastic language, the other more poetic.

Upheaval is a reference to time, voice and the body. In a system where the ability to produce is conditioned by time pre-determined by capitalism, ableism becomes a great problem; in a society where we want to speak more than listen, it can be hoped that civilisation and democracy will enable us to open ourselves up to other forms of communication. Both the poetry of Joacine Katar Moreira and the performances of Alesa Herero and Welket Bungué confront us with the decoloniality of the times. But at the same time as they re-educate oppressor mentalities they also enter into dialogue with oppressed bodies. Just like Calling Cabral, a film that reminds those bodies of the power of distancing oneself from violence and reconnecting with one’s transcendent spirits.

Calling Cabral recalls the speeches of Cabral and gives them a contemporary body and atmosphere. From the point of view of aesthetics, the film is beautiful, with references to both classic cinema and contemporary African art. While the other two films move through the Diaspora and contextualise the Black body within it, Calling Cabral returns to the mainland, calls on Cabral and awakens the conscience and autonomy of the people, to remind them that freedom has already been conquered and that the fight, today, is for being able to make use of it.

Cabral, when he was 20 years old, wrote about his desire to have a child, not in the biological sense but in the hope of later generations continuing the path that he had trodden. And he drew the attention of those children to the need, on that path, not just for survival but for truly living and feeling alive.

“Living” stands out in almost all of Welket Bungué’s works, and especially in Upheaval and Calling Cabral, through the presence of dance/performance: the body moving lightly, seeking the pure feelings that make it human.

Dance, music and performance have always been means of struggle for indigenous people from different territories. Amid so much exposure, desperation to speak and toil, dance emerges as a representation of living and the desire to be alive.