Play
36

Os Continuadores da Revolução: we must not forget the past

2026
PlayPausePausePlay Video

On the light table, I examine thousands of negatives. I find myself surrounded by ghosts that whisper the echoes of Portuguese and Mozambican revolutions.

On the light table, I examine thousands of negatives photographed by Manuel Roberto, in Mozambique, during the time of Samora Machel, the first post-independence president. In these images, I find the history of a country that tried to be the best People's Republic in the world. I find myself surrounded by ghosts that whisper the echoes of Portuguese and Mozambican revolutions.

By  Pedro Neves
Documentary
2026
Portugal, France, Mozambique / 90.
4K / aspect ratio 1.85 / sound: 5.1

Festivals

Doclisboa - World Premiere, Portuguese Competition, 2026
+ More

Credits

Realização

Pedro Neves

Fotografias

Manuel Roberto

Cinematografia

Pedro Neves

Montagem

Tomás Baltazar, Pedro Neves

Som

Ricardo Leite

Música

Ivan Mucavél, João Ricardo OCP, Ramrife

Narração

Pedro Neves, Mudluvela Mazuze, Jenny Neves, Angelina Ndzevo

Misturas de som

Vasco Carvalho

Produtores

Pedro Neves, Marianne Dumoulin, Jacques Bidou, Milton Manhenje

Produção

Red Desert (PT), JBA Production (FR), Incomati Filmes (MZ)

Support

Time Takes a Cigarette / Next

Director’s notes

Os Continuadores da Revolução: we must not forget the past

By  Pedro Neves
Portugal, France, Mozambique
4K / aspect ratio 1.85 / sound: 5.1

On the light table, there’s a series of negatives. Thousands of them, and I examine them one by one. I find many stories. Each image is a story, and I wanted to get to know all of them. Their author is Manuel Roberto, a photographer who lives and works in Porto, just like me.
 
I wasn’t born during the colonial war. Manuel Roberto had been and grew up during it. With independence, which ended centuries of colonization, came a period of peace and dreams. Like thousands of children, Manuel Roberto was a continuator of the revolution within an organisation founded by Samora Machel. The organisation was based on collectivist ideology similar to that in the Eastern Bloc.
 
I was born in 1977, the year the civil war began in Mozambique. On one side was Frelimo that had strong support from the Soviets, and on the other, Renamo, supported by the racist government of Rhodesia and apartheid-era South Africa. The war lasted 16 years and resulted in five million displaced people and one million deaths from combat and hunger.
 
When Manuel began taking photographs, I was a child. While he lived through a colonial war followed by a civil war, I experienced the aftermath of a revolution within a revolutionary family environment.
 
We talked for hours and hours. With every conversation, I became increasingly perplexed by our shared history, his past, and the unfinished and infinite movement of our two revolutions. I found myself searching for the ghosts that I had always been told didn’t exist. I looked for them in Manuel’s photographs, on the red, dirt roads that are the veins of Mozambique, and in the living and the dead. I also looked for them within myself. Perhaps they know where our revolutions are.