Tommy Guns

A stunning film from this year’s Locarno Film Festival, Tommy Guns receives its UK Premiere at LIFF 2022. Angolan-born Portuguese filmmaker Carlos Conceição is a thrilling new talent to watch, with two recent multi-award-winning features to his name – the sci-fi Serpentarius and horror comedy Name Above Title. His most ambitious film yet, Tommy Guns is a dark, powerful, and breathtaking exploration of war, fear, and tyranny, set in 1974 Angola as Portuguese colonists flee and nationalists advance. Tommy Guns is full of surprises as its story shifts from the fate of a tribal girl to that of an isolated squad of Portuguese soldiers.

Portugal, in the final stages of the colonial war, would engage children aged 14 and 15. In the case of these characters, they have been ‘preserved’ in their child-like state, with few memories of their previous life or their mothers. When describing this particular type of dictatorship in Portugal, some would call it ‘watered-down fascism’. I don’t think it was this watered-down. There was no freedom of speech, no access to education, no equal rights for women. There was racism – there still is. Are these old ideas really as gone as people would like to think? Obviously not. Some think we need to shine a light on the new and keep other things in the past. But we should question the present instead, because some of them are still happening.

Director Carlos Conceição, from an interview with Cineuropa