The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder

"Mozambique’s 25-year civil war affected hundreds of thousands of lives. The film director, who grew up in hiding with his family, now returns to his native village.

His task is to create a mosaic of memories of the violent period from which he was sheltered. But his grandmother loses her connection to the past due to a brain disease, and the perpetrators of the rebel resistance retreat into isolation, giving only vague, unreliable accounts of the period of terror.

The film explores how collective memory reshapes recent history and shows how easily people forget. This hypnotic documentary essay uses visuals from the family archive and sound collages to evoke the limits of human memory, grippingly exploring the trauma and pain left by war."