Kuxa Kanema: The Birth of Cinema

Kuxa Kanema: The Birth of Cinema
Directed by	Margarida Cardoso
Screenplay by	Margarida Cardoso
Produced by	Filmes do Tejo, Laspus, Derives
Cinematography	Lisa Hagstrand
Edited by	Isabelle Rathery
Release date	2004
Running time	52 minutes
Countries	Mozambique Portugal

Kuxa Kanema: The Birth of Cinema is a 2003 documentary by Margarida Cardoso on the National Institute of Cinema (INC), created by President Samora Machel following the 1975 independence of Mozambique.

At the time of independence, Mozambique lacked a national television network, so a newsreel program was the only way to reach the population through visual media. The first cultural act of President Machel's government was the establishment of the Kuxa Kanema weekly newsreel program. The newsreels were shown in Mozambique's relatively few cinemas in the 35mm format. In the rural areas, mobile units provided by the Soviet Union offered the newsreels in the 16mm format. Machel's government, however, did not finance or encourage the creation of a film industry designed strictly for entertainment value.

The film also details the struggle to get INC up and running: Mozambique had no film industry or film schools (Brazilian and Cuban instructors were flown in to offer on-the-spot educational training). The resulting newsreels were shot in black-in-white because color film was too expensive.

Machel's death in an airplane crash in 1986, coupled with guerrilla attacks launched by the apartheid governments of South Africa and Rhodesia that destabilized Mozambique to the point of civil war, helped to kill this program. Many of the cinemas in the cities were damaged in the civil war, while the rural presentations of Kuxa Kanema were cancelled due to the lack of safe passage along rural roads. By the end of the conflict, national television had been established and there was no call for a theatrical newsreel presentation.

Kuxa Kanema: The Birth of Cinema offers clips of rarely seen footage from the INC films. It also looks into the offer by French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard to create a national independent television network.

Kuxa Kanema: The Birth of Cinema has played in film festivals and has been released on DVD.

See also

• Cinema of Mozambique
• Estas são as armas, a 1978 National Cinema Institute documentary

External links

• Kuxa Kanema: The Birth of Cinema at IMDb
• Dahlberg, Andrea (October 1, 2004). "Kuxa Kanema: The Birth of Cinema by Margarida Cardoso. First Run/Icarus Films, New York. 2003". leonardo.info. Leonardo On-Line. The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. Archived from the original on 2011-05-21. Retrieved 21 April 2024.. Review.
• Crouse, Edward (April 12, 2005). "ABC Africa. A secret history of the continent's cinema with a scar-cheeked star and a rumpled Godard". villagevoice.com. Village Voice LLC. Archived from the original on 2008-06-29. Retrieved 21 April 2024. On similar turf, Kuxa Kanema: The Birth of Cinema reaches peaks with 1978 footage of a super-rumpled Godard, popping into the newly liberated Mozambique with a "crazy" plan to put cameras into the peasants' hands. A deflationary chronicle of the nation as seen through the Manichaean, Marxist lens of its state-sponsored newsreel series (also called Kuxa Kanema), Margarida Cardoso's doc follows the gradually faltering effort of ebullient president Samora Machel to feed the nation with ideology. Review.
• African Film Festival of Cordoba-FCAT (license CC BY-SA-3.0)

Video

• Kuxa Kanema - O Nascimento do Cinema (2003) on YouTube. Video duration: 52m 01s. Uploader Alvaro A Comin, 2016. Original film. Voice over in Portuguese with English subtitles.