Mortu Nega

This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by tThe Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the FEPACI and UNESCO – in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna – to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema. 

“The war began when I was an adolescent. My family moved from Cadique to another region, and it was there that I met Amílcar Cabral. I was expecting to see a tall man and indeed encountered a giant! Cabral wanted to document the birth of our country, so he sent a group of us to Cuba, to study at Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC). When I returned, he asked us to document the life in the liberated regions – the war, but also the daily lives of people in the countryside, and what life was like under Portuguese rule. He had a clear vision of what cinema could do. We inherited a country with a very high level of illiteracy, and that’s why Cabral wanted us to depict life in images, not words. His aim wasn’t to merely free Cape Verde or Guinea-Bissau, it was to liberate us from fear and ignorance: he could have invested in arms but he gave us cameras instead. (…) MORTU NEGA is a story of a woman who chooses to join the struggle, because she herself wants to be free (…). But she also yearns for her husband. She searches for him for months, years. The story ends when it becomes clear that Cabral is dead; everything he built has been dismantled. Diminga, who has lost everything, returns to her village determined to cultivate the land. It may seem that the struggle is over, but it isn’t.” (F.G., Il Cinema Ritrovato, Festival catalogue 2025)

Cecilia Cenciarelli is Head of Research & Special Projects at Cineteca di Bologna, where she has worked since 2000, and has been one of the artistic co-directors of Il Cinema Ritrovato festival since 2018. Since 2007, she has overseen the restoration of more than sixty films in the framework of the World Cinema Project, an initiative of The Film Foundation dedicated to the preservation and dissemination of non-Western film heritage. She directed the digitization, cataloguing, and research of the Charlie Chaplin and Bernardo Bertolucci archives. She is a member of the FIAF Executive Committee.

Aboubakar Sanogo is an Associate Professor in Film Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He has recently co-edited an anthology with Sarah Cooper entitled Global Circulations of Film Theory, to be published by Edinburgh University Press. He is currently completing two manuscripts on the history of documentary in Africa and on the cinema of Med Hondo and an anthology on the legendary director. As the North American Regional Secretary for the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI), he is the Coordinator of the FEPACI Archival Project, and was instrumental in establishing the African Film Heritage Project (AFHP), a major film preservation and restoration initiative in partnership with Martin’s Scorsese’s The Film Foundation and UNESCO in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna.