Ariel Añez Aims for Universal Connection Through Local, Specific Story

When a group of youths attacked a police station in Awasi, a northern province of Cabo Delgado, Mozambicians had just celebrated Peace Day. It was on the 5th of October, 2017. The attack spread to Mocímboa da Praia, where they looted weapons. The ISIS-linked attackers were identified as jihadistes pinning for the gas boom. They were known as the Ansar al-Sunna / Al-Shabaab and preached against the state, schools, and paying taxes. For context, Cabo Delgado is gas-rich, but Maputo long neglected it. Extreme poverty, disputes over land, youth unemployment, and marginalization of coastal Muslim communities created discontent, and were a regular site of conflict. The insurgency –known as the Cabo Delgado Insurgency, forms the background for Ariel Añez’s Submergido which screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) and Locarno Open Door Screening, where it won the African Film Press’ Critics’ Prize.  

After its IFFR and Locarno screenings, Culture Custodian spoke with the director about the Cabo Delgado war, focusing on children’s perspective amid an ongoing war, and future plans. 

This interview has been edited for clarity. 

There’s a possibility that not a lot of non-Mozambicians haven’t heard of the Cabo Delgado war central to your film. For context, can you tell me, from an insider’s perspective, what it’s actually? What was your own relationship to this conflict before you decided to make a film about it — proximity, distance, family, news? Also, why was it important for your film to revolve around it? 

The conflict in the area is basically an ongoing insurgency that’s been happening in the northern part of the country, driven by Islamist Extremists who look to take control of the area. I don’t have any personal relationship to the conflict, besides the empathy I feel for our brothers and sisters being killed, displaced, kidnapped, and traumatized by a war they never chose to be in the center of. A sense of humanity has made cinema such an impactful art form and is what will continue to make it engaging. As a director, this is among my main objectives, to display humanity on the screen in a universal yet local and specific way, where hopefully audiences  from any part of the world can connect with the story. 

Central to the film is exploring war from multiple perspectives: an at-war soldier, a returning soldier, a wife, and a child. Why were these multiple perspectives important to you? 

Central to the film, in terms of perspective, is the child’s. This was quite deliberate as I think children (in terms of perspective) serve this singular role as a narrative device. We can juxtapose their interior world with the adult world and clearly display its lunacy and dysfunction, which rarely go under observation.  Children’s eyes are pure, innocent, yet simultaneously reliable and unreliable. They see everything and beyond, and are quite interesting narrators as they view the world through a unique lens. The other characters compose the adult world, a world parallel to the child’s. He exists surrounded by it, but out of reach, as the adult world is often inaccessible to children. We heard of it through whispers, through closed doors. Our parents attempted to protect us from it, but even so, there were times where its dread and melancholy seemed to creep from under the closed doors to affect us, and I guess in a sense, it’s also what the film is about.

 The film is quiet and restrained in its opinion of the war. Could you walk us through the writing, directing, and making of the film and its characters? 

In the first drafts, this group of characters and their world merely existed in the periphery. But as I went through re-writes; the grief, the melancholy, the magic of this  world just washed over me in such a visceral and personal way that I understood it was my somatic and emotional artist compass guiding me towards the right direction. A direction which is intimate, personal, colored with lived through events and impressions, serving to further enlighten me on my own writing process, which I come to understand more and more. 

There’s something tender and mystical about Pércio’s connection to his missing father.  Do you think of that as a spiritual truth the film is asserting, or a psychological one —a child’s need for connection made visible?

The film’s essence is inherently spiritual, it was from the start. In the first draft, our main character is an ambulant pastor moving around from bus to bus, spreading the word of God to its unassuming passengers. He was a man who, in childhood, once drowned but was resurrected and was spiritualized for life. The symbol of water as a divine entity still exists in the final version of the film, serving as a point of connection between a father and his son. In short, I’d say the film is doing both, asserting a spiritual truth and a psychological one. As humans, our existence is composed of these different realms (physical, psychological, spiritual etc), and only when they are in harmony are we in harmony. 

Andrei Tarkovsky, one of your cinematic mentors, believed cinema’s purpose was to sculpt time, not tell stories. In your thinking, is Submergido trying to capture what happened to this family, or what time itself does to a family that doesn’t know whether to grieve or hope?

When deliberating the structure for the film, I thought of it in quite simple terms, I simply wanted it to flow, to breeze by. I avoided thinking of structure as a thing that’s rigid or stiff, but rather as an ethereal matter with a life of its own, similar to how Tarkovsky composed his own films. Looking back, I simply wanted to capture the atmosphere of grief in the household after the loss of a loved one as I remembered it following the passing of my father. So I simply transferred that mood over the life of this family. How time seems suspended under grief, its confusion, where we mourn, yet feel compelled to hope that by a miracle, perhaps our loved one will re-emerge from the shadows of death and be next to us again.

Walk us through the visual and sonic language of the film and how central they were to communicating your intentions? 

I thought of the film as atmosphere first, so sound and visuals were very intentional choices, as I wanted to put the audience into a sort of trance from the get-go. When it comes to sound, certain sounds evoke different emotions, sounds of nature for example, are inherently relaxing, that’s why we start off with the sounds of a forest. But I didn’t want to force people into a predetermined direction either, I wanted them to feel what was authentic to them, and that’s why I used mostly diegetic sound. In my view, the overuse of music and sfx can be quite cheap at times, as we try to force the audience into a certain emotional world, rather than allowing them to drift into it naturally. Visually, the movie unfolds mostly at night, giving us this opportunity to harness shadows for mood, to manipulate the impression of the moonlight as blue and cold, naturally aiding us in creating this atmospheric mood of melancholy and mysticism.

The war in Cabo Delgado is inseparable from politics: insurgency, a government apathetic to its responsibilities, massive unemployment, and limited resource conflict. Did you find yourself resisting the political frame in favor of a moral or spiritual one, or did you need both reflected in the film? 

It was never my artistic intention to make a political film, it was always about the emotional resonance of my own life events with those of others, though only comparable in minimal aspects, as it would be extremely disrespectful and insensitive for me to make such claims. Trauma was the film’s main subject. Politics simply didn’t seem to fit inside the world I aimed to build, though I believe the film is inherently political even if its politics are subtle. 

The question the characters and audience have to contend with is if the father will return. Is this a commentary on fathers, brothers, sons, and panthers who will never return? 

There are many situations which can pull us apart from our loved ones. This is one of them, and within it is always the tension of wanting to go back to them but being unable to for whatever reason, this is what I’m dealing with here in the film. 

What are you currently working on? 

I’m currently in production of my next short titled And Perhaps I Will Never Remember, it’s somewhat in this same universe of this world of childhood co-existing with the world of adults, telling the story of Raimundo, an old man on the brink of death, reflecting upon a striking memory of his childhood. I’m also in the early development of my first feature film Kisses from the Dead, a reflection of postcolonial Mozambique.