Nyo Vweta Nafta

“The richer a country, the fewer toothpicks it has.” In Inhambane, Mozambique, the fragmentary and comical portrait of a young generation that dreams, despairs, cleans houses, flirts and climbs the baobab trees.

The filmmaker returns to Inhambane, in Mozambique, where he lived in 2010. He wants to find his friend Nafta but also take the temperature of a young generation that cleans houses or washes cars while waiting to make its fortune abroad. “The richer a country, the fewer toothpicks it has! In Norway, there aren’t any…” The absurd drollery of some dialogues, the originality of the framing, the 16mm grain and the freedom of editing also convey the nonstop pingpong between the sexes. “I want to buy you a car… You’re going to give me a son…” Yet Lisbon-born Ico Costa never locks this generation into frivolity or the transience of the moment. The reading of a text on Portuguese colonialism pops up without warning and one of the boys corrects the speaker who complains that “his grandparents at least had a job”: “They were exploited!” A magnificent sequence at the baobab tree, breaking the flat horizontality of “lazing around” and climbing towards the treetop, brings this diffracted group portrait to a close. (Charlotte Garson)