A film that never shrinks

What an intimate and at the same time ambitious film. Inside it, it's as if various ways of understanding cinema were pulling a rope all the time, each one in its own direction. From this tension is born a film that never shrinks. Based on the experiences of a Portuguese environmental engineer traveling for a project in Guinea-Bissau, La risa y la navaja touches on different themes, always with a penetrating gaze, without wanting to do things by halves – perhaps that's why it lasts more than three hours.

When Pedro Pinho's film (The Factory of Nothing) seeks to reflect on the ravages and the presence in current times of the country's colonial past, it offers different points of view, letting all parties involved speak. When it questions the role of NGOs in West Africa, it also elaborates the discourse by showing all the nuances. And when it combines film genres (road movie, romantic entanglement, criminal intrigue...) and styles of putting a story into images (fiction, essay, poetry, documentary or semi-documentary), it does so with the authority of someone who wants each part of their film to be potentially memorable.

In a certain harmony with Kleber Mendonça Filho's uninhibited stories about realities in the developing world,La risa y la navaja can jump from a tense violence sequence to a queer party, from a bedroom scene to a socio-political monologue, from a vaudeville twist to the testimonies of real people. And, oh wonder, everything interconnects in an absolutely organic way.