Screening of the documentary
Tarrafal: Memórias do Campo da Morte Lenta, by Diana Andringa

May 25th, 2010, 20:00, CES Seminar Room, 2nd Floor, Coimbra

Free entrance – Participants will receive a certificate of participation

Discussion with Diana Andringa, the movie’s director and producer

In celebration of Africa Day


Synopsis

“Tarrafal: Memórias do Campo da Morte Lenta” (“Tarrafal: Memories of the Slow Death Camp”) narrates the story of the concentration camp founded by Salazar, by Order of October 8th, 1935, at the island of Santiago, Cape Verde, to detain “political and social prisoners” and, that, after being closed in 1954, due to national and international pressure, was reopened in 1961, by Order of Adriano Moreira, to detain Angolan, Guinean and Cape-Verdean nationalists.

This is a documentary filmed within the same spaces where prisoners walked, inside the camp, surrounded by barbed wire, a pit and a wall, the cells where they spent years in confinement. One of the rare exceptions is the filming at the cemetery, where we join the homage made by the survivors to the thirty-two Portuguese, two Angolan and two Guinean men who lost their lives there.
Based on the testimonials of former Tarrafal prisoners, this documentary is part of an oral history which is essential to understand a reality still barely known in Portugal and even in the recent Portuguese-speaking African countries – those same countries for which independence these men sacrificed their youth.

“Tarrafal: Memórias do Campo da Morte Lenta” (“Tarrafal: Memories of the Slow Death Camp”) is a first-person story, told in thirty voices, of anti-fascism and anti-colonialism combatants, who Salazar and Caetano’s regime imprisoned in a concentration camp in a Cape-Verdean island. It is a story of men who had their hopes shattered, in the words of the Angolan Joel Neto: “There, we have to stop thinking. Otherwise, thoughts can kill us. We just have to let go. Those who are alive, keep on living. Here, we are already almost dead.” And it is a story of men who knew how to resist until victory: as said by Cape-Verdean Jaime Scofield, “Because, in Tarrafal, we invented live, always!”

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