Stars: João Arrais, Anabela Moreira, Gustavo Sumpta, Leonor Silveira, Miguel Amorim, Ivo Arroja, André Cabral, João Cachola, Vicente Gil | Written and Directed by Carlos Conceicao
For me, it can only be a good thing when I say that Tommy Guns is like no film I have ever seen before. It covers several genres and with the genre shifts, almost feels like it’s changing the story each time – whether it covers wartime drama, zombie flick or art house, it’s always engaging.
The story begins in 1974, just one year before the country’s independence from decades of Portuguese rule. Wealthy colonists are fleeing the country as Angolan revolutionaries gradually claim their land back. A tribal girl discovers love and danger when her path crosses that of a Portuguese soldier. Another group of soldiers, completely cut off from the outside world, blindly follow the brutal orders of their commander in the name of serving their country.
For me, it can only be a good thing when I say that Tommy Guns is like no film I have ever seen before. It covers several genres and with the genre shifts, almost feels like it’s changing the story each time – whether it covers wartime drama, zombie flick or art house, it’s always engaging.
The story begins in 1974, just one year before the country’s independence from decades of Portuguese rule. Wealthy colonists are fleeing the country as Angolan revolutionaries gradually claim their land back. A tribal girl discovers love and danger when her path crosses that of a Portuguese soldier. Another group of soldiers, completely cut off from the outside world, blindly follow the brutal orders of their commander in the name of serving their country.
- 4/18/2023
- by Alain Elliott
- Nerdly
"S'kwata! S'kwata! S'kwata!" Kino Lorber has revealed the official trailer for a film titled Tommy Guns, made by up-and-coming filmmaker Carlos Conceição. Winner of Best European Film Award at the 2022 Locarno Film Festival, Tommy Guns has elicited comparisons to the work of Claire Denis, Miguel Gomes, and even M. Night Shyamalan, and it announces a bold and exciting new voice in Portuguese and Angolan filmmaking. Described as an "ambitious and exquisitely crafted genre-fluid fantasia." In 1974, after years of civil war, the Portuguese and descendants fled the colony of Angola (in Central Africa) where independentist groups gradually claimed their territory back. A tribal girl discovers love and death when her path crosses that of a young Portuguese soldier. Meanwhile, another group of Portuguese soldiers is barracked inside an infinite wall from which they will have to escape once from the past comes out of the grave to claim its long-awaited justice.
- 3/16/2023
- by Alex Billington
- firstshowing.net
Exclusive: Kino Lorber has struck a deal with Paris-based sales firm Wide for North American distribution rights to Carlos Conceição’s Locarno Film Festival war drama Tommy Guns.
The pic will receive a North American premiere at New Directors/New Films, the annual film festival hosted jointly by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Conceição and actor João Arrais will be in attendance, and a theatrical release via Kino Lorber will follow on April 12.
Billed as “a genre-fluid fantasia” that engages with Angola’s colonial past, the pic opens in 1974, one year before the country’s independence from Portuguese rule. Wealthy colonists are fleeing the country as Angolan revolutionaries gradually reclaim land. It’s against this backdrop that a young tribal girl crosses paths with a Portuguese soldier, which introduces her to a new world of love and danger. At the same time, another group of soldiers, completely...
The pic will receive a North American premiere at New Directors/New Films, the annual film festival hosted jointly by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Conceição and actor João Arrais will be in attendance, and a theatrical release via Kino Lorber will follow on April 12.
Billed as “a genre-fluid fantasia” that engages with Angola’s colonial past, the pic opens in 1974, one year before the country’s independence from Portuguese rule. Wealthy colonists are fleeing the country as Angolan revolutionaries gradually reclaim land. It’s against this backdrop that a young tribal girl crosses paths with a Portuguese soldier, which introduces her to a new world of love and danger. At the same time, another group of soldiers, completely...
- 2/28/2023
- by Andreas Wiseman and Zac Ntim
- Deadline Film + TV
Nação Valente Review — Nação Valente (2022) Film Review from the 75th Annual Locarno Film Festival, a movie written and directed by Carlos Conceição, starring João Arrais, Anabele Moreira, Gustavo Sumpta, Leonor Silveira, Miguel Amorim, and André Cabral. For all the “both sides” and “it’s complicated” discourse that’s flooded the media with regards to world events this year – particularly [...]
Continue reading: Film Review: NAÇÃO Valente: Historical Revisionism As the Real Horrors of War [Locarno 2022]...
Continue reading: Film Review: NAÇÃO Valente: Historical Revisionism As the Real Horrors of War [Locarno 2022]...
- 8/11/2022
- by Jacob Mouradian
- Film-Book
Portugal’s colonial past in Africa continues to haunt some of the country’s most vital and subversive filmmakers. With his remarkable second feature “Tommy Guns,” Angolan-Portuguese director Carlos Conceição’s steps into the same precarious territory sometimes occupied by Pedro Costa and Miguel Gomes — borrowing, perhaps, a measure of the former’s visceral austerity and the latter’s shape-shifting playfulness, but mostly proving his own sly, supple talent. Formally and structurally audacious in ways that build in power and meaning as the film unfolds, this study of a Portuguese military squad gradually unraveling in a remote, bloodied wilderness begins with a clear sense of time, place and space, before collapsing those certainties in a horror-tinged nightmare that nods to the sprawling impact of colonialism across eras.
That brush of genre influence — comparable, in its subtle, dimension-twisting fluidity, to Mati Diop’s recent “Atlantics” — ought to heighten interest around “Tommy Guns...
That brush of genre influence — comparable, in its subtle, dimension-twisting fluidity, to Mati Diop’s recent “Atlantics” — ought to heighten interest around “Tommy Guns...
- 8/9/2022
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
In 1952, Warner Bros. released a version of “The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima” that boasted, “To the best of human knowledge, and according to the testimony of 100,000 witnesses … This Is A True Story!” That film, hokey in some ways, inspirational in others, purported to be a fact-based account of a faith-based story, one that occurred in 1917 against the backdrop of a world war, wherein three Portuguese shepherd children experienced several visits by the Virgin Mary, who bestowed certain insights upon them before unleashing a spectacular solar light show so as to convince all those assembled.
Director Marco Pontecorvo revisits these events in the superficially suspicious “Fatima,” which arrives at a moment when faith and facts find themselves in direct opposition, when claims of “fake news” render the very notion of “a true story” all but meaningless. The film releases in theaters and on demand amid a global crisis — not just the pandemic,...
Director Marco Pontecorvo revisits these events in the superficially suspicious “Fatima,” which arrives at a moment when faith and facts find themselves in direct opposition, when claims of “fake news” render the very notion of “a true story” all but meaningless. The film releases in theaters and on demand amid a global crisis — not just the pandemic,...
- 8/27/2020
- by Peter Debruge
- Variety Film + TV
Finally making its way into American theatres on the cusp of its director’s passing, Mistérios de Lisboa [Mysteries of Lisbon] gives us an epic look into the bourgeois dramatics of Portugal’s capital city. The press notes for the film contain a pretty accurate and concise three-word description by Raúl Ruiz—“birth, betrayal, redemption”. That triplet sums up Camilo Castelo Branco’s 1854 novel and the adapted screenplay from Carlos Saboga to perfection, each word a huge piece to the tale surrounding an anonymous orphan named João. But as his mystery is uncovered, the sprawling soap opera turns into a sumptuous visual splendor of the past and fate’s often surprisingly coincidental blueprint. Through the orations of dying men and men raised from the ashes of dead aliases, Lisbon is brought to life through its 19th century aristocratic nobility. With a young boy in search of an identity at its center, his part...
- 9/6/2011
- by jpraup@gmail.com (thefilmstage.com)
- The Film Stage
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