Domy+Ailucha: Ket Stuff!

In 2020, unable to travel to Mozambique, Ico Costa asked Ailucha and Domingos to film their daily lives with a camera he had left in Inhambane the previous year. The camera acquired a special presence in the group, recording the teenage life, the working, the playing, the hanging around, the singing and dancing, the desire.

With a hand-held camera, Domy and Ailucha film themselves and their friends, their neighbours, the district’s children. They film their wanderings, their romances, their leisurely afternoons in the ochre streets of Inhambane and the blue frontiers of this coastal Mozambican city. Very much alive, the camera plunges into daily life without our knowing much about it. We never know who is holding it, who is looking at it. It stops, sets off again, we recognise no one but meet everyone. It is handed around like a ball in a game, finds its targets, comes across faces, gathers a few words, tender, provocative, playful, sometimes insolent. The project is simple, a camera in the hands of a young man and young woman from Inhambane, a game of juggling and montage of their strolls for a film driven by a discreet passion. The camera circulates between stories and bodies: loving when the day is over, cleaning the car, smoking joints, searching out good spots, finding something to do. In short, hanging out in a city locked down by quarantine, but still wide open to those who hold its keys. The film becomes a portrait of youth and a portrait of a light perhaps. Desires drift – the desire to be handsome, beautiful and proud. Everyone poses, to music or in silence, on a tree stump or on the beach. Ico Costa’s film, guided by the eyes of Domy and Ailucha, is a peaceful and secret meander around a strangely deserted city. We remember a few faces, a few flashes of conversation, a few jokes, a few hopes, a vitality and an evening light. 

Clémence Arrivé