THE HERO

Showings

THEATER 1 Wed, Mar 25 6:00 PM
Film Info
Runtime:97
Release Year:2004
Genre:Drama
Production Country:Angola
France
Portugal
Original Language:Portuguese
Cast/Crew Info
Director:Zézé Gamboa
Cast:Makena Diop
Milton Coelho
Patrícia Bull
Gracy Costa
Maria Ceiça
Screenwriter:Fernando Vendrell
Carla Baptista
Pierre-Marie Goulet

Description

Vitório, a war veteran who lost his leg to a landmine, returns to Luanda after Angola's decades-long civil war searching for his family and employment. Despite being promised support as a war hero, he encounters bureaucratic indifference and must survive through informal street work. His young son Manu, traumatized into muteness by witnessing wartime violence, navigates the streets separately while searching for his father. Gamboa's neorealist approach captures post-conflict Luanda's contradictions: luxury high-rises alongside musseques (slums), military propaganda versus abandoned veterans, reconstruction rhetoric against lived poverty. The intersecting searches of father and son illuminate how war's wounds persist in peacetime, questioning what heroism means when society abandons those who sacrificed.