In the Empty City

In the Empty City (Hollow City, 2004) is the first feature film written and directed by Maria João Ganga. Ganga was born 1964 in Huambo, the third largest city in Angola, which is on the west coast of Southern Africa. Ganga attended the Ecole Superieure Libre d'Etudes Cinématographiques (ESEC) film school in Paris and later worked as an assistant director to Abderrahmane Sissako on the documentary Rostov-Luanda (1998) and has also written and directed for the theater. With the release of In the Empty City, a drama revolving around an 11-year-old orphaned by the Angolan Civil War, Ganga became the first woman to make a full-length feature movie in Angola. Her film would go on to win the Special Jury Prize at the 2004 Paris Film Festival. The Angolan Civil War erupted in 1975 after Angola became independent of Portugal. It would last for over 27 years until 2002, at which point more than 500,000 people had been killed and over one million more people were displaced. Set in 1991, In the Empty City follows a young boy by the name of N'dala (Roldan Pinto Joäo) whose life was shattered by that war when he witnessed the massacre of his family by soldiers in his native village of Bie. These events are revealed in flashback. The movie begins with N'dala and other rescued orphans being unloaded by a military plane in Angola's capital city of Luanda. The children are being escorted by a missionary nun who will spend the rest of her screen time looking for N'dala after he breaks loose from the pack to disappear into the city. Unlike such famous orphans as Tom Sawyer or Oliver Twist, N'dala's trajectory will be free of romanticized plot points and be grounded by the daily cadence of the disenfranchised. N'dala strikes out onto the streets and beaches alone with nothing but a toy car he constructed himself out of cans and wires. He meets a kindly old fisherman who talks of mermaids, and he also forges a friendship with a 13-year-old boy by the name of Zè (Domingos Fernandes Fonseca). Zè does menial chores in exchange for a meager allowance from his so-called "godmother," a prostitute whose boyfriend is a mechanic and petty criminal. N'dala and Zè sneak into a movie house and later sit around with adults while they dance and drink. They also sell cigarettes to motorists. Zè rehearses his lines for a school play. Through their respective experiences the viewer gets an authentic sense of the ebb and flow of life for those who live on the margins of Luanda. Ganga's script for In the Empty City is based on As Aventuras de Ngunga, a 1972 novel by Artur Carlos Mauricio Pestana dos Santos, a major Angolan author who writes under the name Pepetela (a Kimbundu word that means "eyelash," which is a translation of his Portuguese surname, "Pestana"). Music is provided by Né Gonçalves and Manu Dibango. (Dibango, an award-winning and prolific Cameroonian musician whose afro-jazz-funk fusions influenced scores of others, died in Paris on March 24, 2020 from COVID-19.) The songs provide an element of beauty and warmth to enliven moments, often pushing people to dance. The cast of mostly untrained actors adds a touch of neorealism to the proceedings. The characters are unpredictable and nuanced. Their humanity is fully on display as they struggle to make ends meet, kill time, play, cheat, move their feet and grind their hips to the radio, fish, eat, plan a crime and dream of bigger things than that which their reality might grimly impose. By Pablo Kjolseth