Teresa Prata's feature film adaptation of Mia Couto's book of the same name (Terra Sonambula in Portuguese) is a cinematic poem for Mozambique, which was ravaged by postcolonial civil war from 1977 to 1992. Sleepwalking Land (2007) beautifully highlights how the country's war survivors are like somnambulists, deliriously dreaming of alternate realities to cope with their traumas. The coming-of-age plot follows 11-year-old Muidinga (Nick Laura Teresa who was cast just three days before filming began) as he wanders the countryside with a storytelling elder, Tuahir (Aladino Jasse), who saved him from an untimely death in a refugee camp. Muidinga yearns to find his mother and recall his past, but he suffers from amnesia. When he and Tuahir take shelter in a burned and abandoned bus, he discovers a diary with a narrative that seems to be a rejoinder to his own. As he reads, the film folds in a parallel story-within-the-story, flashing back to a young man, Kindzu (Helio Fumo), who, having lost his own family to the war, is in search for Gaspar, the son of Farida (Ilda Gonzalez), a woman he has met and with whom he has fallen in love. Muidinga is convinced that Farida is his mother and, as he turns the pages of the diary, the desolate landscape that he roves magically transforms from dry to lush, and the two storylines begin to converge. Despite the film's fantastical elements, Prata intentionally departed from some of the magical realist elements of the book, aiming for its reversal: "supra-realism," telling fairytales in a realistic way. Yet for its stylistic solemnity, it remains hopeful - even more so than the book - especially the end. "My intention," Prata explained in an interview, "was to make Mozambicans look less sadly at their own history, or maybe to look at their traumatic history more poetically. My film is not as sad as the book's ending because I believe in the future of Mozambique." Sleepwalking Land took nearly eight years to complete and benefitted from Prata's childhood memories of living in Mozambique during the Portuguese Colonial War for independence.

By Rebecca Kumar