Film screening: Mangrove School

Screening and Q&A with film scholar Catarina Laranjeiro (Institute of Contemporary History, NOVA FCSH, Lisbon, TBC, Zoom) on anticolonial cinema, performative postcolonial pedagogies and ecological crisis.

Mangrove School (2022), Sónia Vaz Borges, Filipa César
2022 | Portugal / Spain / France / Guinea-Bissau |

„We recently went to Guinea Bissau to research the guerrilla schools of the mangroves. Instead, we soon became ourselves the apprentices and the first lesson we had to learn was how to walk. If you walk straight, placing your heels on the ground first, you promptly slip and fall in the dams of the flooded mangrove rice field or you get stuck in the mangrove mud. You need to lower your body, flex your knees and stick your toes vertically into the mud, extend your arms forwards in a conscious and present movement. In the mangrove school the learning happens with the whole body.“

Catarina Laranjeiro is a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History at NOVA FCSH, where she develops research on anticolonial and vernacular cinema in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau and the respective diasporas in Portugal and France.

Suggested Reading
Vaz Borges, Sónia, and Filipa César. 2022. “Militant Mangrove School.” 

Vaz Borges, Sónia. 2019. Militant Education, Liberation Struggle, Consciousness: The PAIGC Education in Guinea-Bissau 1963-1978. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 53-101.
Freire, Paulo. 1977 “Guinea Bissau: Record of an Ongoing Experience.” Convergence 10 (4): 11–28.

This screening is part of the lecture series „Berliner Kulturwissenschaft“, organized by Robert Stock (Department of Cultural History and Theory)