Tommy Guns

In 1974, after years of civil war, the Portuguese and their descendants fled the colony of Angola where independentist groups gradually claimed their territory back. While a tribal girl discovers love and death when her path crosses that of a young Portuguese soldier, a group of Portuguese soldiers barracked inside an infinite wall are called to escape once the past comes out of the grave to claim its long-awaited justice. Borrowing its original title from the lyrics of Portugal’s national anthem, this visually arresting and uncompromising film is at once a relentless study of colonialism and a parable of the devastation of warfare. Blending genres and tones, this imagi-nation in chiaroscuro is an ode to male beauty and mortality, vaguely alluding to the quasi-metaphysical cinema of Pedro Costa.