Easterly Wind

Action-investigation – methodology as an act of restitution

The former Portuguese colonies of Macau, Goa, Daman and Diu (former ‘Portuguese India’) and Timor have limited access to colonial film footage, most of which is held in Portugal. There is no such thing as a filmography and no information has been categorised with regards to what institutions may have collected films or possess documentation. The difficulty in gaining access to films and the lack of organised information about colonial filmography limits knowledge of this field and, consequently, of life under colonialism, hindering the debate about how the colonial period may be imagined, and post-independence life projected, by these very same communities.

It was during a post-doctoral investigation, which examined how Portuguese colonial cinema internalised the tendencies of the French and British equivalents, that I became aware of the lack of research around the filmic material representing ‘Portuguese Orientalism’, and the importance of distinguishing between ‘Portuguese India’, Macau and Timor.

The time I spent surveying the French and British archives resituated my perspective with regards to the filmic materials deposited in Portugal. If the Portuguese colonial film archive is relatively small compared to those of other, more powerful empires, the ‘Portuguese Orient’ segment is even smaller and sparser, especially when compared to its ‘Portuguese Africa’ counterpart.2

In addition to reviewing the films, mostly at the Arquivo Nacional das Imagens em Movimento [National Moving Image Archive] of the Cinemateca Portuguesa (CP) [Portuguese Cinematheque], I also visited Goa and Macau, to research the local libraries and archives. Despite the Covid-19 forced interruption – confinement was imposed midway through my stay in Macau, but I was still able to travel to Goa, wherefrom I returned in March –, I still had an opportunity to examine the relevant records and survey the press.

Prior to this spell in the Asian archives, between January and February 2018, I programmed the cycle ‘Cinema Macau. Passado e presente’ [Cinema Macau. Past and present] at the CP and the Fundação Oriente [Orient Foundation]. It comprised ten screenings, each followed by a Q&A session, which I chaired, open to questions from the public. In September 2019, I also programmed ‘Era Uma Vez em Goa: Identidade e Memórias no Cinema’ [Once Upon a Time in Goa: Identity and Memories in Film] at Fundação Oriente, which included seven screenings, again followed by a discussion chaired by myself and open to the public. These two cycles were repeated in Goa – ‘Once Upon a Time in Goa: Identity and Memories on Film’, 18 February to 3 March 2020, Fundação Oriente Índia, Panaji – and Macau – ‘Cinema Macau. Past and present’, Fundação Oriente Macau Delegation, 26 June to 4 July 2021. The cycle ‘Timor-amor. Os filmes’ [Timor-amor. The films], which I programmed for the Fundação Oriente and the CP between 6 and 31 May 2022, and which included seven screenings followed by Q&A sessions chaired by myself, concluded this effort, as a first step towards a gesture of restitution which essays an indication of how the public perceives the representations and identity questions put forward by the films.3