Mangrove School

During Guinea-Bissau’s struggle for independence from Portugal in the 1960s, rebel leader Amílcar Cabral launched an ambitious education programme to fight the Portuguese colonial power. In ‘Mangrove School’, Filipa César and Sónia Vaz Borges traverse the history and impact of the movement. In the 1960s and 70s, the nomadic guerrilla schools under the mangrove trees became symbols of the people’s anti-colonial struggle, including against the colonial mentality itself. A school system set up by militant rebels, which for the same reason became the target of bomb attacks during the country’s long struggle for independence. Based on historical research, and at the crossroads of art and political theory, César and Borges revisit the history of the mangrove schools in a documentary fable of resistance, independence and autonomous forms of education. [CPH:DOX]

with the support of
Harun Farocki Institut, House of Culture of the World, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Fundació ”la Caixa” General Directorate of the Arts, School of the Arts – UCP, Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP), Department of the Seine-Saint-Deni

2022
Cinéma du Réel, Paris
CPH:DOX
Frames of Representation
20 doclisboa
RIDM, Montréal, Canada

We recently went to Guinea Bissau to research the guerrilla schools of the mangroves. Instead, we soon became ourselves the apprentices and the first lesson we had to learn was how to walk. If you walk straight, placing your heels on the ground first, you promptly slip and fall in the dams of the flooded mangrove rice field or you get stuck in the mangrove mud. You need to lower your body, flex your knees and stick your toes vertically into the mud, extend your arms forwards in a conscious and present movement. In the mangrove school the learning happens with the whole body (Sónia Vaz Borges & Filipa César).