Two Black royals, 200 years apart, possess modern dancers. History doesn't ask permission to collide.
Proposes a speculative meeting between the Baron of Água Izé, the first nobleman in the Portuguese colonies of the 1800s who was of mixed European and African ancestry, and Maria Correia, the Black Princess of Príncipe Island in the 1700s. Reanimating them through the bodies of contemporary artists, the film uses dance, poetry and music to weave profound threads between the past and the present. Transcending space, time and language, their encounter wrestles with questions of culpability, power and the exploitation of both land and Black bodies.
Direction
Bungué channels possession as documentary method.
Cinematography
Bodies become landscapes; landscapes accuse.
Sound
Score breathes where colonial records suffocate.
Director
Welket Bungué
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Água Izé was the first roça (plantation) in São Tomé; the Baron's mixed heritage made him both colonizer and colonized, a tension the film refuses to resolve.
Welket Bungué developed this through his 'Arquétipo' practice—using performers' bodies as medium rather than character, which explains why the possession feels uncomfortably real.
GW
PT
