“Balane 3” was filmed in 2019 and fully placed in Mozambican, “Balane 3” a dynamic rhythm that brings the city to a live life on the screen. Director ICO Costa, who made other documentary films in Mozambique, has a mobile camera that managed to tell the story of a place through its people with no identification of anyone by name or follow -up in the traditional Cinéma Vérité style. Costa and cinema photographer Hugo Azifido AIP mostly puts her cameras at a distance, resulting from the vision of the external that commemorates the faces and conversations that make up a crowded city.
The film, which was called the name of the neighborhood in which it was filmed, takes life by monitoring how people talk to each other – on the street, in hair salons, while working together, in restaurants, at a birthday party. The directors of the directors sometimes stop watching a specific event, such as dance or secret temptation. Sometimes it moves behind a motorcycle contest or next to a person walking on the beach. Whatever it is, the people who watch them become a proven story. Among the fixed shots, there is a lot to remain long enough to tell a full story through the interactions and movement of people within the frame.
Then there are conversations. Many conversations. These people talk about life, love, most of them about sex: What makes them go, whether the secret habit weakens the ability to endure, who want to seduce it. An individual scene is revealed outside a high school where many students are collected in groups. They are separated by gender, with boys on a side, girls on another. Both parties occupy looking at the other. There is a moving talk, limiting each other. Follow the camera while one person moves from the boys section to raise a conversation on the other side. When all eyes are close to both camps and the girl who is approaching, a love story begins between the two. One of them had the nerve to take a step, however the other carried the key to reciprocity.
The audience does not recognize anyone by name, profession, or any other identifier. A single person appears in “Balane 3” in more than one scene. However, their novels never feel not complete. The audience does not get a short overview of life, however, the way Costa and the RAUL DOMINIES editor is doing it, never feels that something has been excluded. Cutting, the audience gets a feeling of how he might feel live in Inhabane. Perhaps more than anything else, “Balane 3” indicates that Voyeurs may make excellent film makers, attracted to things that unusual spectators may consider. Everyone tells and everything that is shown here the audience with a bra, albeit real.
However, this foreigner’s looks may also be interpreted as colonial. After all, the Portuguese director there is a brutal history between his country of origin and Mozambique, the Portuguese colony until 1975, a country whose official language remains from the former imperialist supervisors. These mysterious complications appear in the scenes in which Costa is depicted by Mozambican’s traditions. A long dance sequence, “Beau Travail”, is not harmful enough, but negotiating marriage between two families in the conflict? Like the length and narration to the scene of the aforementioned school square, a long period of time is provided for this sequence.
While the Costa camera remains a distant spectator, in showing the locals who discuss virtue, dowry and other topics that are rooted in their traditions, it raises the issue of whether Costa and his collaborators should be familiar with something special and remove it from their reality. She reminds us of Claire Dennis’s films in Africa, and accused another film director in some angles of a colonial look. The answer in both cases is that film makers never pretend that they are not foreigners, and they notice what interests them. Their view never claims to ownership of what it picks up.
From the general gatherings to intimate moments, “Balanae 3” is a tissue from the city in the city. Her scenes may be unrelated scenes, and there are no connective narrative strings that must be followed and there are no heroes to get to know them, yet it is a full documentary film for the city and its people.