It’s tough when you want to like a film a little more. The idea and spirit is present in Tommy Guns, but an overwhelming air of academicism––something that’s sadly begun infecting art cinema in the past decade, its films made more and more by directors self-conscious of the festival circuit tics and requirements––leaves it hard to commend overall.
There’s an intriguing setup: the film takes place in 1974, near the end of the African country Angola being reclaimed from Portugal by insurgent guerrilla forces. Placing us in the middle of proceedings as the colonizer military fights a losing battle, we hone in on the inner workings of an Angolan village. An overly naturalistic make-out scene early in the proceedings, followed by a shocking murder, and then (naturally) a 27-minute-in title-card drop brought worries I was watching Friedberg / Seltzer’s newest spoof Locarno Movie. That said, some...
There’s an intriguing setup: the film takes place in 1974, near the end of the African country Angola being reclaimed from Portugal by insurgent guerrilla forces. Placing us in the middle of proceedings as the colonizer military fights a losing battle, we hone in on the inner workings of an Angolan village. An overly naturalistic make-out scene early in the proceedings, followed by a shocking murder, and then (naturally) a 27-minute-in title-card drop brought worries I was watching Friedberg / Seltzer’s newest spoof Locarno Movie. That said, some...
- 4/6/2023
- by Ethan Vestby
- The Film Stage
Exclusive: Kino Lorber has struck a deal with Paris-based sales firm Wide for North American distribution rights to Carlos Conceição’s Locarno Film Festival war drama Tommy Guns.
The pic will receive a North American premiere at New Directors/New Films, the annual film festival hosted jointly by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Conceição and actor João Arrais will be in attendance, and a theatrical release via Kino Lorber will follow on April 12.
Billed as “a genre-fluid fantasia” that engages with Angola’s colonial past, the pic opens in 1974, one year before the country’s independence from Portuguese rule. Wealthy colonists are fleeing the country as Angolan revolutionaries gradually reclaim land. It’s against this backdrop that a young tribal girl crosses paths with a Portuguese soldier, which introduces her to a new world of love and danger. At the same time, another group of soldiers, completely...
The pic will receive a North American premiere at New Directors/New Films, the annual film festival hosted jointly by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Conceição and actor João Arrais will be in attendance, and a theatrical release via Kino Lorber will follow on April 12.
Billed as “a genre-fluid fantasia” that engages with Angola’s colonial past, the pic opens in 1974, one year before the country’s independence from Portuguese rule. Wealthy colonists are fleeing the country as Angolan revolutionaries gradually reclaim land. It’s against this backdrop that a young tribal girl crosses paths with a Portuguese soldier, which introduces her to a new world of love and danger. At the same time, another group of soldiers, completely...
- 2/28/2023
- by Andreas Wiseman and Zac Ntim
- Deadline Film + TV
Portugal’s colonial past in Africa continues to haunt some of the country’s most vital and subversive filmmakers. With his remarkable second feature “Tommy Guns,” Angolan-Portuguese director Carlos Conceição’s steps into the same precarious territory sometimes occupied by Pedro Costa and Miguel Gomes — borrowing, perhaps, a measure of the former’s visceral austerity and the latter’s shape-shifting playfulness, but mostly proving his own sly, supple talent. Formally and structurally audacious in ways that build in power and meaning as the film unfolds, this study of a Portuguese military squad gradually unraveling in a remote, bloodied wilderness begins with a clear sense of time, place and space, before collapsing those certainties in a horror-tinged nightmare that nods to the sprawling impact of colonialism across eras.
That brush of genre influence — comparable, in its subtle, dimension-twisting fluidity, to Mati Diop’s recent “Atlantics” — ought to heighten interest around “Tommy Guns...
That brush of genre influence — comparable, in its subtle, dimension-twisting fluidity, to Mati Diop’s recent “Atlantics” — ought to heighten interest around “Tommy Guns...
- 8/9/2022
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
Exclusive: Paris-based sales company Wide has acquired world sales rights to Angola-born Portuguese filmmaker Carlos Conceição’s Angolan War of Independence drama Tommy Guns, which made a well-received debut in Competition at the Locarno Film Festival on Friday.
Set against the final violent days of the conflict in 1974, the film gives a dual perspective of the conflict through the tale of a young local girl who discovers love and death when her path crosses that of a young Portuguese soldier.
The film is lead produced by Terratreme Filmes, the Lisbon-based collective created by award-winning Portuguese directors João Matos, Susana Nobre, Tiago Hespanha, Pedro Pinho, Leonor Noivo and Luisa Homem in 2008.
Virginie Lacombe and Arnaud Quesada at Paris-based Virginie Films are on board as co-producers and Conceição and Margarida Ventura take associate producer credits under their Portuguese Mirabilis banner.
Wide head of acquisitions Maxime Montagne, who finalised the deal in Locarno...
Set against the final violent days of the conflict in 1974, the film gives a dual perspective of the conflict through the tale of a young local girl who discovers love and death when her path crosses that of a young Portuguese soldier.
The film is lead produced by Terratreme Filmes, the Lisbon-based collective created by award-winning Portuguese directors João Matos, Susana Nobre, Tiago Hespanha, Pedro Pinho, Leonor Noivo and Luisa Homem in 2008.
Virginie Lacombe and Arnaud Quesada at Paris-based Virginie Films are on board as co-producers and Conceição and Margarida Ventura take associate producer credits under their Portuguese Mirabilis banner.
Wide head of acquisitions Maxime Montagne, who finalised the deal in Locarno...
- 8/5/2022
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- Deadline Film + TV
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