Rotterdam

Hollow City

Na Cidade Vazia (Angola)

By JAY WEISSBERG

An Integrada (Angola) production, in co-production with Animatografo2 (Portugal). (International sales: Integrada Producoes, Luanda.) Produced by Francois Gonot. Directed, written by Maria Joao Ganga.
 
N'dala - Roldan Pinto Joao
Ze - Domingos Fernandes
Joka - Raul Rosario
Rosita - Julia Botelho
Nun - Ana Bustorff
 

Angola's 30-year civil war wiped out any film culture, and only now as relative stability takes root are attempts being made to find its cinematic voice. Making her feature debut with the clear-eyed, powerful "Hollow City," Maria Joao Ganga establishes herself as a talent to be watched. While not entirely free from first film slip-ups, Ganga's calm, unsentimental look at the realities of a war-torn nation as it affects an 11-year-old boy is never less than sharp and touchingly effective. New director fests should take note, as well as wide-ranging programmers looking for simply told tales with substance.

It's 1991, and a ragtag assortment of bloodied soldiers and exhausted civilians are airlifted from central Angola to the seaside capital of Luanda. Among the group are orphaned children shepherded by a solicitous nun (Ana Bustorff). Young N'dala (a surprisingly assured Roldan Pinto Joao) decides to break away, and escapes alone into the rubble-strewn city with just a small bag and a toy truck he crafted from scraps in happier times.

It's N'dala's first time in an urban setting, and he inquisitively wanders the decaying streets, dodging the enforcing curfew until he finds himself faced for the first time by the ocean. The next morning he continues his meanderings, meeting up with Ze (Domingos Fernandes), an older schoolboy who lives with his fierce godmother.

Open-hearted Ze befriends N'dala but can't offer the boy accommodation. Instead, he convinces self-absorbed prostitute Rosita (Julia Botelho) to allow N'dala to sleep at her run-down place, and introduces him to Joka (Raul Rosario), a Jack-of-all-trades whose easygoing jocularity and self-confidence wins both boys over, despite evidence of shady dealings.

Rosita and Joka run a sideline selling contraband, and she insists N'dala earn his keep by fencing cigarettes to passing cars, alongside scores of streetwise children. The nun who brought him to Luanda has been frantically looking for him, but N'dala's goal is to head back home, to the familiar nighttime skies he's convinced contain the spirits of his slaughtered parents.

There's an inexorable pull in "Hollow City" that subtly but steadily strips N'dala of his childhood innocence. The nun's desperation in her search for her lost charge is all the more imperative as N'dala's artlessness becomes ever more chipped away by the instability of a city teetering on the edge. Ganga views it all with a cool camera, avoiding easy sentimentality and pathos, but the slow build-up of conspiring forces leaves little room for anything but quiet despair, as the nun knows only too well.

The problems here are minor matters -- an occasional awkwardness with cutting, sporadic timing issues. Most of Ganga's performers are theater people, but young Pinto Joao is a cherubic faced newcomer whose sweet nature and vulnerability, but never bathos, makes N'dala's fateful slide a disturbing inevitability. This is one of those uncanny child performances that blurs the line between reality and playacting.

The low budget doesn't hamper style; it couldn't have been an easy shoot, but look and sound are first rate.

Camera (color), Jacques Besse; editor, Pascale Chavance; music, Ne Goncalves; production/costume designer, Sao Amaro; sound (Dolby), Gita Cerveira, Tiago Matos; assistant director, Nuno Milagre. Reviewed at Rotterdam Film Festival (Hubert Bals Fund), Jan. 29, 2004. Running time: 91 MIN.