With Nayola, José Miguel Ribeiro plunges us into the lives of three women who, each in their own way, struggle with the silences of a story that cannot be told, of a history yet to be written—that of independent Angola.

Weaving together two different timelines, the film defies chronology to reveal parallels and disjuncture across three generations. Yara, the daughter, lives in the capital city, Luanda. She cries out her anger at the corruption and impunity of those in power through sharp rap lyrics. Chased by the police during the hustle and bustle of Carnival in February 2011 (at the dawn of the Arab Spring, soon to be felt in Luanda), she takes refuge in her teenage bedroom at the back of her grandmother’s house. The old woman hides her grief under an imperturbable mask. She lost her husband and brother in the war against the Portuguese, then her daughter and son-in-law in the civil war. Nayola, finally, the mother, is depicted in the Angolan bush in 1995. She abandoned her two-year-old daughter Yara to find her husband, who “disappeared in combat” in the cold terminology of warfare. “You don’t just disappear,” Nayola insists. “Here, people disappear very slowly, sometimes even before they die,” responds one of her comrades-in-arms, whose resigned wisdom gradually gets the better of her.

Ribeiro explores all the dimensions permitted by an animated film to dig into the gray areas between memory and oblivion. In terms of drawing techniques, Nayola brings together aesthetics ranging from quasi-photographic reproduction to calligraphic brushstrokes. The electrifying soundtrack blends iconic tracks from the revolutionary music of the 1960s with the most contemporary Angolan rap. The screenplay, written by Virgílio Almeida, is based on a play by two monuments of contemporary Luso-African literature: José Eduardo Agualusa (Angola) and Mia Couto (Mozambique).

From a filmic point of view, Nayola is a gem of inventiveness. Each heroine is drawn in a different style: Lelena, the grandmother, with her gray complexion and geometric face crossed by wrinkles that tell us as much about her age as about her worries; Nayola, the mother, with her angular, highly stylized face, and sharp colors; and Yara, the daughter, whose mismatched eyes inhabit cheekbones drawn in the manner of a Tchokwe mask.

This graphic research is placed at the service of the story, which straddles two eras. Nayola’s itinerant journey in the late 1990s, when she joins a battalion (whether it is MPLA or UNITA is never revealed), takes place in two-dimensional natural landscapes, painted in broad strokes on brightly colored backdrops. Yara’s urban wanderings in 2011, on the other hand, are treated in a more realistic three-dimensional animation, teeming with details familiar to anyone who knows Luanda, such as the iconic white-and-blue Toyota vans known as candongueiros (collective taxis) or the graffiti painted by local youth to identify their turf on the walls of informal neighborhoods.

Between the two timelines, Ribeiro ventures into striking graphic experimentation, blending documentary and fiction. A magnificent musical interlude seizes on original archive images (photos and videos) in which Nayola’s silhouette has been embedded, strung along columns of war-displaced people, caught by soldiers with guns on their shoulders or crossing minefields. A little later, in a burst of liberating rage, Nayola destroys some exoticizing and racist azulejos. Once again, anyone who knows Luanda will recognize the mosaics exhibited in the military history museum even if, for the purposes of fiction, they appear to be buried in the ruins of a palace in a town we guess is Huambo, in the south. This subtle reference to colonial heritage symbolizes the traumas passed from one generation to the next and the silent decolonial aspiration that runs through the movie.

In its bold inventiveness, Nayola explores the constant shifts between past and present, fiction and reality, and the unspoken and the unseen. The film follows in the footsteps of the magic realism so prevalent in Angolan literature, which is gradually taking hold in the cinema, notably in the productions of the Geração 80 group, which has established itself in recent years as one of the leading production companies in African auteur cinema. In fact, this is one of Nayola’s feats: to establish itself as an Angolan film, even though the production company is technically based in Europe.

Agualusa, the Angolan writer and coauthor of the play that inspired the film, says: “I suspect that most Angolans will feel a similar emotion when they watch the film. The images of Luanda, the characters’ voices, their accents and language, even the way they move, evoke an immediate recognition: this is, without a doubt, an Angolan film” (Nayola, press kit, p. 7). This is partly due to the fact that the actresses who lent their voices to the characters were free to say the text in their own words. Recorded at the Geração 80 studios in Luanda, the dubbing is effectively imbued with the linguistic mannerisms of Luanda Portuguese, far removed from the stereotypical Lisbon accent that dominates mainstream Portuguese cartoons.

The question of blocked memories and intergenerational taboos eventually becomes one of languages and voices. Who can speak in Angola today? How can we invent a language to convey the untransmissible?

When a burglar armed with a machete breaks into their home, Lelena conquers her fear by serving soup to the masked silhouette. Yara, waking up in the middle of the night to this strange scene, asks her grandmother: “Who is this man, mamã?” “He’s a neighbor from the old days,” lies the old woman without batting an eyelid. But is it really a lie? In Nayola, memories intrude on the present like masked burglars. A photo stained with nail polish symbolizes the memory that is maintained with nail varnish remover, while Yara’s rap CDs, for which she is hounded by the police, scatter across the floor like her grandmother’s dreams of independence.

Because its political charge never evaporates, the film avoids the risks of aestheticizing war, and takes its place in the great library of Angolan fictions that transform political sociology into a work of art.