Name: Mother Tongue Film Festival: As Noites Ainda Cheiram a Pólvora (The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder)
Start: 2025-02-23T16:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-02-23T18:00:00-05:00
Location: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

$Mother Tongue Film Festival: As Noites Ainda Cheiram a P\u00f3lvora (The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder)$

As Noites Ainda Cheiram a Pólvora (The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder) (dir. Inadelso Cossa, 2024)
In the aftermath of Mozambique’s civil war that lasted from 1977 to 1992, the filmmaker visits his grandmother, confronting fading memories and blurred lines between truth and fiction. A former rebel’s presence in the village echoes the ghosts of war, mirroring the tensions of his generation. Shot extensively at night, the film interweaves his grandmother’s recollections with sequences of villagers reenacting harrowing events, combining performance and autoethnography to capture the feeling of a place still grappling with the past.
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The Smithsonian’s Mother Tongue Film Festival celebrates cultural and language revitalization by showcasing films and filmmakers from around the world, highlighting the crucial role languages play in our daily lives.
The festival is a public program of Recovering Voices, a collaboration between Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of the American Indian, the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and the Asian Pacific American Center.
Image credit: As Noites Ainda Cheiram a Pólvora (The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder) (film still)
ACCESSIBILITY
All films are fully open captioned or subtitled in English. The venue is wheelchair accessible.