Amílcar Cabral, the revolutionary leader of the Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde, or PAIGC), has experienced a renaissance of late. Over the last decade a number of books and media projects have examined his leadership, writings, and assassination in 1973. Most, including the recently edited English-language volume Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amílcar Cabral (Daraja Press, 2014) and Valerio Lopes’s film Cabralista (2011), tend to politicize Cabral, presenting him as a pan-African leader, a visionary philosopher, and a timeless pundit. While Cabral’s importance is not in doubt, these books tend to lose the human side of a multifaceted man. Ana Ramos Lisboa’s documentary Amílcar Cabral helps fill this void by offering a complete exploration of Cabral’s life, though one that feeds a growing mythology.

Lisboa’s work is at once a challenge and reinforcement of the Cabo Verdian view of Cabral as larger-than-life founding father and martyr. Opening with death rather than birth, the first scenes contrast family reactions to Cabral’s assassination with the memorialization of his life in a primary school. This dichotomy between man and myth frames the entire film. A fairly conventional narrative follows his birth in Guinea and childhood in Cabo Verde, his education in Lisbon, the launching of PAIGC, and his efforts to lead the nationalist struggle. Lisboa includes no narration and few explanatory slides. Cabral’s life is told primarily through interviews with those who knew him best—family, classmates, revolutionary colleagues, and friends. Aristedes Pereira, the first president of Cabo Verde and PAIGC founder, narrates Cabral’s boyhood on the islands and how it shaped his worldview; students read his poetry in sunny courtyards; and former military commanders recall his active participation in the armed revolution. Cabral’s views on education, the role of women, diplomacy, and culture are all discussed briefly, as are the increasingly desperate attempts by the Portuguese to end the war. The director intersperses these reminiscences with an impressive array of historical images and contemporary footage. The film ends as it began, with Cabral’s assassination, recounted poignantly by his wife, who witnessed the event.

It is tempting to view documentaries that make heavy use of interviews as primary sources in themselves. Yet Lisboa clearly selects passages and coordinates images to explore the contrast between man and myth. The human side of Cabral appears here more than it has appeared in either print or film. His family and colleagues speak glowingly, but they ground their descriptions in details that make him seem approachable. His first wife describes a twitch in his temple that revealed the repressed anger of an outwardly calm man. His daughter discusses how her absent father always responded warmly to her melancholy letters. A colleague recalls his unsuccessful attempt to place women on the front lines. In these testimonies Cabral is humanized but never criticized. In this way it follows recent African documentary films on Agostinho Neto and Frantz Fanon which deify their subjects without losing sight of their mortality. Ending with Cabral’s death allows Lisboa to avoid the postindependence split between Cabo Verde and Guinea that undermined the dream of unity, even as she sidesteps the intraparty divides that led to Cabral’s assassination. These decisions create a more idealistic and unspoiled vision of revolutionary politics than has appeared in the somewhat jaded films of Flora Gomes and Lisboa’s own fictional feature Cabo Verde Nha Cretcheu (Cape Verde, My Love, 2007).

Rather than a commentary on present realities, Amílcar Cabral is a celebration of Lisboa’s birthplace, subtly highlighting the foundational principles of Africa’s most stable democracy through the figure of Cabral. Its cinematography revels in the stark beauty of Cabo Verde, a common element in the director’s work. Interviews (of men in particular) take place at seaside verandas and brief meditations on landscapes bookend some scenes. Affection for the homeland, founder, and ideals all become linked in the film. In the recorded memories, viewers can experience the emotions that this revolutionary figure and memories of his death still inspire in his friends, family, and colleagues. Even the filmmaker’s travel in Portugal speaks to a certain foundational myth, providing a first-person exploration of the places that Cabral experienced in proverbial black-and-white. This time-jumping pursuit of memories, both mundane and historical, merges with a largely triumphal narrative to universalizing Cabral’s message and appeal, making him seem almost timeless,

Amílcar Cabral is an extremely valuable film. The contextualized interviews provide a glimpse into Africa’s fading revolutionary history in a satisfyingly watchable package. Though much of the information is available in the growing historiography on Cabral, the film reveals the ways that Cabo Verde and Guinea-Bissau have mythologized a man cut down in his prime. It is by far the best introduction to Cabral—both as individual and foundational figure—available in a single hour.