I Only Rest in the Storm

Garnering an acting award at Cannes for Cleo Diára, this sprawling, low-key odyssey puts first-world assumptions about international aid in the crosshairs.

Sérgio, an engineer working for an NGO, travels from Portugal to Guinea-Bissau to conduct an environmental assessment for a planned new roadway project through the desert. But as his workdays blow out into wild nights in the tropical city of Bissau, he spends more and more time with an array of locals, including charismatic bar owner Diára (Cleo Diára) and non-binary Brazilian expat Gui. Through conversations touching on privilege, power dynamics, politics, postcolonialism, queerness and the troubling realities of Western funding, Sérgio’s self-satisfied progressive values are gently pricked.

Confronting lingering white-saviour tropes, Pedro Pinho’s loquacious epic offers a fascinating companion piece to his three-hour industrial-action docufiction The Nothing Factory, which won the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight FIPRESCI Prize in 2017. Drawing on his experiences as a documentarian, the Portuguese-born, Brazil-based filmmaker blurs lines between fact and fiction, happily entertaining meta layers of onscreen critique about the film’s own production. It all makes for a sprawling, funny, fluid, taboo-busting conversational piece destined to spark further discussion among viewers.

“The big swings this wending odyssey takes in merging genres and weighty ideas … pay off – it’s a gargantuan, continent-crossing feat.” – IndieWire