Ruy Guerra’s Mueda, Memória e Massacre: The missing images

Regarded as the first fictional feature film of independent Mozambique, although this categorization only describes it inadequately, Ruy Guerra’s Mueda, Memória e Massacre (‘Mueda, Memory and Massacre’) (1979/80) documents a Makonde collective re-enactment of the Mueda Massacre (1960). Exemplifying Mozambican Liberation Aesthetics, the film was censored, partially re-shot and re-edited. The altered version aims to respond to a historiographical apparatus seeking to organize and codify Mozambican history. The censorship, partial re-shooting and re-editing tried to adapt Mueda, Memória e Massacre to the official view of the Mueda Massacre and to the emerging film canon, revealing an authoritarian ‘modernist’ paradigm. The film’s missing images create an archaeology of FRELIMO’s political and cultural programme and show the contradictions between ideology and political praxis in the late 1970s.