#4 Mangifera (2022)

The film opens with a book buried by the roots of a mango tree growing in a planter at the last home of the late Samira Pereira, a Cape Verdean cultural activist deceased in 2021. From this scene grows an experimental attempt at the construction of her fictional, geographic, emotional, and affecting cartography. The fiction, complexity. and nuances of identity are built upon based on imagined maps of both Cape Verde and the Cape Verdean diaspora. A collaborative process developed among several Cape Verdean communities in various countries, helps to draw imagined parallels between Samira Pereira's biography - she was born a year after the country's independence - and the historic and political events that marked her circle of friends and co-conspirators, her legacy and cultural activity, and the territories whereupon she lived, namely those that influenced departure and return migratory flows. #4 MANGIFERA is chapter four in a five-part project entitled "NA LUT@" (Kriolu for both "on the struggle" and "in mourning"), which results in free-standing artistic products. Mourning and loss are transversal themes, departing from the five stages of grief postulated by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.