“Cossa’s debut is a remarkable object with the good fortune of finding its best scene near the end.”

At twilight the world becomes a shadow against a sky ablaze. The natural landscape of Mozambique is an inky blackness to the fading light, painting silhouettes over color, all serene stillness. But in the middle of this quietness something moves, something decidedly unnatural. It’s a directional microphone, held high and in search of a sound we, the audience, aren’t privy to. At most, some drowsy dialogue can be gleaned from a great distance, while the crickets that sing at sunset muffle everything else. Nevertheless, the apparatus proves unrelenting in its quest, continuing to look for the sound of stories capable of resurrecting the dead. Ghosts are always present in a film such as this, but now they might be heard, their sound captured and preserved. That’s the true treasure the microphone seeks and, with it, the camera whose gaze illuminates the screen.

The hands that hold these tools of cinema belong to boom operator Moises Langa and to Inadelso Cossa, a filmmaker returned to his grandparents’ village in Mozambique to investigate the country’s history. Specifically, he considers the scars left on land and people, marks of a civil war (1977-1992) whose terrors didn’t evanesce when the killing stopped. Survivors still live today, their psyches haunted by a violence that didn’t truly go away and was never overcome. It’s a nightmare that follows them like dreamers who walk the oneiric path even in waking life.

The personal is political in The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder, a film bookended by flurries of archival footage that provide what little context Cossa gives to the uninformed viewer. It starts with images of Mozambique in decades past; its people. It starts with images of feet pounding the restless earth, physical labor as the entry point into the film, and a first meeting with its ghosts. After all, what is this documenting but a material haunting, phantasms trapped in celluloid and a cycle of repetition? From labor to domestic joy to death on the battlefield, tears and guns, smoke and the glare of a blood-red sun – it all goes around in circles within the archive, the reel. When The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder cuts from them, it cuts to the present at the end of the day’s long journey into night.

In the face of the realities presented in this archival footage, the nocturnal is almost comforting, as if the void protects those who linger with questions on their lips and recorders at the ready. People are also more willing to share their secrets when the sun isn’t looking down on them with its judgmental brightness. And so, under the blanket of shadow, the artists wait for their companions to speak, for the dormant gunpowder to ignite again. When it does, the firepower comes in the form of testimonies, words shared by survivors whom the film prods into storytelling sessions. True or false, it doesn’t matter, as long as the survivors talk their hearts away, for anything these people say is a revelation and something that should be documented for the sake of a nation’s historical knowledge, no matter what forces may try to make the past taboo.

Within their words, fact and fiction hold hands, while evasion marries the fabulist impulse of those for whom reality is unbearable. It’s impossible to ignore how trauma persists in the storytellers’ lives, in psychological and sensorial, almost physiological terms that the picture eagerly articulates without falling into the clichéd intercutting between spoken word and illustrative footage. The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder thus represents an attempt at seeing the ineffable through alternative strategies, the sights and sounds and smells and scares that govern those living in the aftermath of war. The light of cinema shall show such things, make the abstract tangible and able to be registered on the screen. At least, that’s the stated intention, expressed in a self-reflexive voice-over by the director turned narrator.

Added to this, there’s the grandson’s affection for the matriarch who, in old age, seems to be losing her grip on her past. Though the cineaste’s intervention is rare, it becomes more prevalent as the film advances, suggesting that the screen itself has started to second-guess the woman’s testimonies it came to immortalize. Gradually, she appears incapable of recollecting anything concrete that isn’t her husband. Did the grandmother bury her memories with the grandfather? Perhaps she did, intentionally or not, as a coping mechanism or merely the effects of time on an aging mind.

As gunpowder turns to dust, and light to shadow, cinema becomes memory. But memories are imperfect, as one can plainly see. Certainty erodes, yet the pain of loss remains steadfast. All this contributes to a nearly imperceptible somnambulistic sense of urgency running beneath the film. It further blurs the line separating the documentary from fiction. Then again, dogmatic views of cinema only lead to stagnation. They would also limit the medium’s ability to become the sort of memory play Cossa moves toward, away from conventional idioms. His style is certainly opposed to documentarian clichés, leaning on the artificial (de)construction of cinematic images. As scenery, he privileges desolate spaces, ruined on the verge of liminality, that are then lit to maximum contrast. Bright light always rankles, a purposeful intrusion whose presence deepens shadow and limits the visible spectrum even more.

Comparisons to Pedro Costa are inevitable but not entirely justified, seeing as Cossa deploys these mechanisms in ways that diffuse the real rather than accentuate it. That’s how Mozambique’s locations can look almost indistinguishable from a black box theater tableau. Similar things can be said about his staging of interviews and meta-cinematic conversations between the crew. At the height of assumed artifice, we find a few fantastical shots of day turned into a night with no stars in the sky and the sun masquerading as moon. It’s not the technique of classical moviedom, but a digital wizardry that manipulates the image further still, a surge of hyperreality for a new age of cinema. In contrast, the appearance of old photographs and a slew of daylight interludes or the shock of a goat’s death offer a perilous sense of unmediated reality that’s bound to bend and twist in communion with the other images.

Rhythmic structures pull The Night Still Smells of Gunpowder into the realm of slow cinema, inducing trance-like qualities in the spectator’s experience. Some may dismiss the film as too meandering for its own good, going past the point of repetition into redundancy. And that’s not even breaching the coherency fault lines drawn by the daytime scenes. Such are the marks of a novice filmmaker, full of ideas and potential but not yet in complete control of his chosen medium. Whatever the case, Cossa’s debut is a remarkable object with the good fortune of finding its best scene near the end. It’s when the elderly and the children gather around the fire, weaving narratives out of their old pains, a generation in communication with the next and keeping the collective memory alive, imperfect as it may be.