Official Competition 2018

Our Madness

João Viana I 2018 I 90'

SYNOPSIS

Lucy is hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital in Mozambique. She dreams about her little son, Hanic, and her husband, Pak, who is a soldier of the war. One day Lucy takes her opportunity to run away from the hospital and then a journey begins with the logic of a trance.

BIOGRAPHY

João Viana

JOÃO VIANA (Angola, 1966) first studied law and then began his film training. He works as a director, scriptwriter, producer and sound technician. He has collaborated with directors such as João César Monteiro, Manoel de Oliveira and Werner Schroeter. Our Madness, which had its world premiere at the Berlinale 2018, is his second feature film.

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Critical text

"The gate is open and Ernania runs. It begins in that gesture of despair, and still completely silent, an adventure that escapes from the prison shadows that stain the walls of the asylum, but the expedition is still wrapped in a black and white that pushes us towards fascination as we wander through streets and waste ground of a Mozambique in which colonial echoes still survive. The images and mise-en-scène of João Viana seem to inhabit that limbo where certainty is canceled and mirages take over the real world. In Our Madness the sound knows how to distrust words and is able to turn to music, the ringing, the murmur or silence to show that dimension only accessible through madness, a deep delirium without stridency, like the beautiful cinematography by Sabine Lancelin.
In his previous feature film, The Battle Of Tabatô (2013), Viana already managed to dismantle that simplistic version by which Western cinema seems to see only one side of African history. In Our Madness, that virtue is joined by a magical and austere story and never far from emotion. CHRISTINE MCPHERSON

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