Amílcar. 2025. Spain/Portugal/France/Sweden/Cape Verde. Directed by Miguel Eek. North American premiere. DCP. In Portuguese, French, Creole, Spanish; English subtitles. 87 min.
A deft and daring feat of montage, Amílcar combines newsreels, Portuguese colonial archives, revolutionary cinema, and original 16mm compositions to evoke a free-form portrait of the Cape Verdean/Guinean revolutionary figure Amílcar Cabral. The Spanish documentarian Miguel Eek uses Cabral’s political writings, poems, and private letters—as well as documents detailing his increased surveillance by the Portuguese state—to trace Cabral’s path from agronomy student in Lisbon to freedom fighter and charismatic leader in the liberation movement against Portuguese rule. Far from a comprehensive biography, Amílcar attempts to render a complex interior portrait of Cabral under the momentous weight of his time. The man, the visionary thinker, the tactician, the diplomat—each emerges behind Cabral’s political project of African emancipation and self-determination, which precipitated the independence of Guinea-Bissau and the collapse of the Salazar regime in Portugal, mere months after Cabral’s assassination in 1973.