Acto dos Feitos da Guiné / Acts of Guinea-Bissau

Fernando Matos Silva

Fernando Matos Silva, born in 1940, director, editor and producer, is the author of about twenty feature-length documentaries and fiction. He studied on a scholarship at the London Film School and then, in the 1960s, worked as an assistant to the young filmmakers of Cinema Novo, Paulo Rocha and Fernando Lopes, and became involved in the anti-salazarist struggle. In 1969, like thousands of men of his generation, he was sent to the front, captain in the film service in Guinea-Bissau, then in Angola in 1971. The images he shoots for him, with his Arriflex and the film he brought in secret, will be the starting point of Acto dos Feitos da Guiné, made ten years later. His first feature-length fiction, O Mal Amado (1973) was banned by the regime. In 1974, he was put in the confidence of the coup de force prepared by the captains, his former comrades, and thus became the first to film, with the same team that accompanied him in Guinea, the main events of April 25. He participates in the collective work Caminhos da Liberdade and engages on the front of struggles and cinema, with documentaries that examine the Portuguese society in full transformation. For several years, he directed a television magazine dedicated to cinema. Several of his works deal with contemporary history: Meu Nome É… (1978), A Guerra do Mirandum (1981) and O Meu Avo Republicano (2012).