Air Conditioner / Ar Condicionado
Gothenburg
Sat 19 Nov
14:15 — Hagabion
Malmö
Sat 26 Nov
18:45 — Panora
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PRODUCTION YEAR: 2020
GENRE: Drama
DIRECTOR: Fradique
COUNTRY: Angola
FILM DURATION: 72
AGE LIMIT: Not rated
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When air-conditioning units mysteriously start to fall from buildings into the streets of the Angolan capital of Luanda, security guard Matacedo (José Kiteculo) is sent on a mission to recover the precious AC unit belonging to his boss. Matacedo's assignment will take him across the city to Kota Mino's electrical supply store, which is secretly assembling a complex memory retrieval machine, and from there through the streets and stories of the city. In AIR CONDITIONER, Luanda itself is a character, full of buildings which visibly bear its history and people trying to rebuild their lives after the civil war. Featuring a soundtrack from rising Angolan star Aline Frazão, the film was written, produced and shot entirely in Angola by collective Geração 80.
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LANGUAGE: Portuguese
SUBTITLES: English
Review
Something very exciting is happening in Angola regarding the cinema sphere. Among the many new production companies, one stands out: Geração 80. Founded in 2010, it has since then produced six short films, four documentaries and two feature-length fiction films. Ar Condicionado (2020) was the first of these fiction features, directed by Fradique, one of the founders of the company (with Tchiloia Lara and Jorge Cohen). The second, which premiered a few months ago at the Locarno Film Festival, is called Nossa Senhora da Loja do Chinês (2022), and was directed by Ery Claver (the cinematographer and co-writer of Ar Condicionado). What defines the work of this collective is the urgency with which they film the city (Luanda) and its people; the refusal of any kind of exoticism that frustrates (in a good way) the expectations of the western spectator about what one understands by “African cinema”; and a preference, as far as possible, for metaphors whose meaning is not immediately (if ever) revealed. Ar Condicionado starts as a portrait of a decrepit building in the centre of Luanda (on Rua Rainha Ginga, in the Mutamba neighbourhood, right in the heart of the city), focused on two characters who work there, Matacedo (security guard) and Zezinha (maid), and ends up becoming a kind of reminiscent dream in sci-fi lo-fi mode, with touches of surreal media dystopia (considering the preponderance of the radio propaganda). It all starts with a heat wave that forces the air conditioners to overload, but instead of power outages or mere breakdowns, what comes from the overuse of these appliances is that they just give up: the air conditioners simply stop working and “throw themselves” to the ground, just tired. If this could be a comment on the fragility of Angolan infrastructures and the poor living conditions in the capital, there is something symbolic, which I cannot help but “read” as a metaphor for the hardships of the proletariat and the exhaustion of a class system – the falling of the air conditioners reminds me of the disturbing shot in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008), when the workers in a building under construction began to “rain”.
But the metaphor isn't obvious or straightforward, and everything gets complicated when “Cota Mino” (the local appliance repairman) claims that the air conditioners fall like fruit from trees when they're ripe. He suggests that, in a city without plants, the air conditioners took over the ancestral function of storing memories and, when they are full, they just let themselves fall. This mystical science fiction perspective, that merges tradition with memories (backed by one of the most beautiful sequences in the film in which Mino’s “machine-car” takes Matacedo to travel through time and space without leaving the same place), accentuates what the opening credits already discreetly announced: the influence of La Jetée (1962). Ar Condicionado’s opening credits consist of a series of black-and-white photographs of the neighbourhood, with strong contrasts and a lot of grain, like those in Chris Marker's film. And, in addition to this visual reference, there is the matter of memories, the relationship between time travel and sleep, the decrepitude of a present as opposed to some sort of nostalgia and, more than that, the improvised nature of the production and the crude quality of the retro-futuristic devices. Fradique pays homage to Marker – and, to a certain extent, there is also something of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) – and, in the process, he produces a political fable about Luanda, as atmospheric as it is mysterious.
Ricardo Vieira Lisboa
À pala de Walsh