User Reviews

A fascinating jaunt through a part of Africa unfortunately rarely put on film.

The flag of Portugal is replaced with that of Angola on top of a fort on the titular island of dogs - a summary of sorts of the subject of the film. Though essentially none of the characters are characters merely analogies to large subsets of the population the film gives us some breathtaking imagery and violent scenes of dogs attacking various evil-doers, Portuguese and Angolan.

Today, by chance, I found this film, which is a co-production between Portugal and Angola. That's my first foray into Angolan cinema. After seeing it, I can't say that I was disappointed, but the film leaves us wanting to see something more that never comes.

The plot is based on a book and centers on a mysterious island, dominated by a pack of dogs. The island was bought by a group of investors from Luanda, who decided to expel the fishermen who lived there to build a large resort for foreign tourists to spend their paradise holidays. We've seen similar things happen in real life... However, as the work progresses, the construction workers start to be killed by the dogs that give the island its name. Pedro Mbala is sent to solve the problem. The film cleverly links the ghostly dogs to a curse cast by a sorcerer who was killed by the Portuguese settlers.

I've never read the original book, so I can't ascertain how faithful the movie was to the book. What I can say is that the movie is surprisingly shorter than I expected, just about an hour long. It's short and leaves many explanations on hold, giving the audience the freedom to think what they want. The story has a lot of supernatural and even spooky, but it is clearly the specter of colonialism that Angola seems to need to exorcise. Not everything was bad in the Portuguese presence, and not all Portuguese were vicious, racist or greedy. There is no page of history, from any country, that is wholly good or bad, wholly made up of good or bad people.

The cast is not bad, it is average, and curiously it is almost totally made of actors of dual citizenship, Portuguese and Angolan. Miguel Hurst does a satisfactory job, and seems to me to be a very competent actor. I also liked the work of Ciomara Morais (although I think her character was too sexualized) and Matamba Joaquim. The film also has a good participation by José Eduardo and João Cabral, and a brief cameo by Nicolau Breiner.

On a technical level, the film stands out for its careful choice of filming locations. As far as I realized, and after some research, a good part of the film was filmed in São Tomé e Príncipe. However, one of the sets that impressed me the most was actually a graveyard in Tômbua, a city that for decades has been fighting the advance of the Namibe Desert. I also liked the scenes in the fortress, although I couldn't figure out where it is. The cinematography isn't bad, but it's a little televised, and the film feels more made for TV than for film. The special effects and CGI used are sparse, but they do their job in an intelligent way.