Letters to Angola: images, sounds, poetics and encounters

Abstract

This paper explores elements that make up the poetic force of Letters to Angola (2011), a documentary directed by Coraci Ruiz and Júlio Matos (Cisco Laboratory - Brazil). The film explores exchanges of written, read, and filmed letters between people living in Angola, Brazil and Portugal. There are exchanges between friends, between artists, between researchers. There are seven 'pairs' of people, some are well known, others are little or no known at all. As researchers, we explore the relevance of this filmic work for those who work on Africanities and Brazil-Angola relations. We revisit the exchanges of letters, the images and the sounds that create correspondences, with special attention to the one between the poets Ondjaki and Ana Paula Tavares. These two Angolan writers talk to us about life and saudade, they talk about being far and close to Angola, living outside their country of origin, in Brazil, in Portugal. Among records of memories, accounts of places, within the philosophical theoretical framework of cinema and literature by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, we explore the elaboration of this artistic monument (DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2004) from the point of view of its poetics and encounters.

KEYWORDS: Brazil and Angola Relations; Africanities and Education; poetics.