With love from Angola

AfricAvenir will be screening the Namibian Premiere of The Great Kilapy on 26 July 2014 at the Goethe-Centre at 19:00. The film was directed by Zeze Gamboa in 2012 and is about a crook who is irresistible, who on the eve of Angola’s independence in 1975, pulls off a massive swindle at the expense of the Portuguese colonial administration.
The story takes place in the period between 1965 and 1974 and relates the adventures of a petty crook who draws up a master plan to try and swindle money from the Colonial Tax and Revenue Services.
Director Zeze Gamboa says that the narration of these adventures permits a gaze on a recent period of Portuguese/Angolan history, in which he intended to show the glamour of the rich sixties, the irreverence of young people at that time and the greatness and frailties of a regime in utter decline.

“This is a period that is somewhat mythical nowadays and that has never been dealt with in the cinema of these two countries, either out of forgetfulness or other unfathomable reasons on the one hand (Portugal), or due to the several different trials of a recently-born country in which it is only now that there is the birth of what we may call fictional cinema” said Gamboa.
Inspired by a real figure, The Great Kilapy is a take on the national liberation story and turns its conventions upside down with elegance and humour.
It depicts the world of wealth, glamour and insouciance in which the elite class moves against the background of the colonial regime’s collapse.
Zeze Gamboa was born in Luanda in 1955.
He worked for Angolan television between 1974 and 1980.
In 1984 he qualified as a sound engineer in Paris and worked as such on numerous international productions before starting to work as a documentary director.
 In 1992 as the peace process in Angola got underway, he attempted to develop his first feature, but the renewed eruption of civil war meant that The Hero did not emerge until ten years later. The Great Kilapy is his second feature film.