The author of a vast and diverse body of work, Ruy Duarte de Carvalho was an Angolan filmmaker, writer, and anthropologist. In 1975, even before the proclamation of independence, he began working at Televisão Popular de Angola (TPA). As one of the station’s few staff members with prior training in the field—in fact, three years earlier, he had studied Film and Television Production in London—he began his career in audiovisual media with the collective project Sou Angolano, Trabalho com Força (1975), a series of investigations into working conditions in various parts of the country, in which Áurea de Carvalho, Carlos António, Jorge Gouveia, Raúl de Almeida, and António Ole also participated. Also in 1975, he directed the documentaries Geração 50 (1975)—a kind of visual essay juxtaposing images of Luanda with the poetry of António Jacinto, Viriato Cruz, and Agostinho Neto—and Uma Festa Para Viver (1975)—a medium-length film shot over the fifteen days leading up to independence, documenting the expectations of the capital’s population and, in particular, the residents of Cazenga. The following year, after the withdrawal of the South African army that had occupied the southern portion of Angolan territory for several months, he left Luanda and headed south. This journey—which, as he describes it, took him through “four of the country’s nine linguistic areas” and brought him into contact with “no fewer than fifteen ethnically distinct populations”—resulted in the short film O Deserto e os Mucubais (1977), the trilogy *Angola 76*, *It’s the People’s Turn to Speak* (1977), as well as his first foray into fiction, *Take Heart, Comrade* (1977). Returning to and further developing his cinematic vision—which from the outset sought to shift the focus away from the nation—the filmmaker began a new project in 1977 with the filming of Angolan Present, Mumuíla Time (1979), comprising the films A Huíla e os Mumuílas, Lua da Seca Menor, Hayndongo: O Valor de um Homem, Pedra Sozinha Não Sustém Panela, O Kimbanda Kambia, Ofícios, Ekwenge, Makumukas, Kimbanda e Ondyelwa: Festa do Boi Sagrado. With filming of the decalogue complete, a new project began with the production of Nelisita (1982), a feature-length fiction film based on two works of oral literature nyaneka, whose cast consists mostly of the protagonists from Lua da Seca Menor, who were previously asked to “play out the course of their own lives” and are now called upon to “step into the shoes of certain characters.” With this film—to which he added a written reflection later published in Portuguese under the title O Camarada e a câmara: cinema e antropologia para além do filme etnográfico (1984)—he earned his diploma from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, an institution where he would shortly thereafter complete his doctorate in Anthropology. In 1982, he released O Balanço do Tempo na Cena de Angola (1982), an essay film that, traversing various regions of the country, reflects on human history and the ways it is inscribed in the national landscape. Also in the 1980s, she directed her final film, Moia: o recado das ilhas (1989), a Portuguese-French-Angolan production that recreates, in Cape Verde, the Shakespearean confrontation between Prospero and Caliban.

Sofia Afonso Lopes

Rute Magalhães was born in Porto in 1944, but it was in Malanje that she spent her childhood and part of her adolescence before moving to Lubango to continue her studies at Colégio Paula Frassinetti. In the 1960s, she moved to Lisbon to study Chemical Engineering at the Instituto Superior Técnico. In the capital, she joined the editorial and cultural sections of the Casa dos Estudantes do Império, an organisation founded by the Estado Novo regime with the aim of accommodating university students from the then Portuguese colonies, which, contrary to the regime’s intentions, became a hub for anti-colonial and pro-independence mobilisation. Before the institution closed in 1965, she even translated MPLA statements that were then smuggled to Angola in shoe boxes. In 1968, she was arrested by the PIDE on suspicion of ‘subversive activities’, and held in Caxias for two weeks. In 1974, having completed her degree in History at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon, she returned to Angola, where she went on to work at the Secretariat of State for Education and Culture and, subsequently, at the Centre for Pedagogical Research and School Inspection (CIPIE), where she worked on the preparation of textbooks and other teaching materials for the subject of History. In 1977, she accompanied Ruy Duarte de Carvalho on the filming of the ten-part series Presente Angolano, Tempo Mumuíla (1979) in the south of the country, producing, during that period, a body of photographic work which – in addition to having served as the basis for some of Carvalho’s drawings – would, years later, be exhibited by the author, in a gesture of revisitation motivated, as she describes it, by “the resonance that ‘being Mumuíla’ still has in me today”. Regarding these photographs, the anthropologist and curator Nuno Porto would write that they are “slow, candid, full of detail, of events that unfolded until the composition of each image and then, independently of it, continued”. She subsequently attended the Centre d’Études Africaines at the University of Paris I – Sorbonne, where she developed a project on the African press published in Portugal. In this context, and within a particularly fertile academic environment, she crossed paths with researchers such as Jean Devisse and Alfredo Margarido, leading figures in the field of African studies. Back in Lisbon, she completed a course in photography and another in ceramics at Ar.Co. Since then, she has been pursuing a regular artistic practice, presenting her work in various exhibitions.