On the streets of Porto, Travessias Malungas is being born, a short film that connects the stories of resistance to slavery in Brazil with the contemporary experiences of black migrant women in Portugal. Letícia Simões’ video-essay is one of the projects supported by Filmaporto’s Neves Grant.
Using the body, gesture and memory as tools for creation and insurgency, the film is based on the resistance strategies of three black women against the slave trade in Brazil: Maria Felipa, in Bahia, who led a group of women against Portuguese invaders, articulating tactics that combined cunning and collective strength. Maria Benguela, in Sergipe, who led a quilombo and built an autonomous community with political, economic and spiritual structures. Maria Rufina, on the other hand, remains less well known, but the persecution she suffered at the end of the 19th century reveals how the slave regime continued to operate in the bowels of institutions, even after its formal abolition. For Letícia Simões, the most striking thing was realising how these women, even in the face of brutal systems, acted collectively to protect their communities and keep their cultures alive. ‘Resistance is not only about confrontation, but also about creating spaces for life, care and spirituality,’ she says, emphasising that shared practices such as cooking, singing and the exchange of knowledge are powerful forms of insurgency.
In the film, the crossing is both literal and symbolic — from the shores of the South Atlantic to Porto, where these stories intertwine with the testimonies of black migrant women collected in Porto. These narratives come to life in the work through the performances of Tony Omolu and Wura Moraes. ‘In the end, every gesture, every silence, every displacement was an attempt to bring me closer to the paths they travelled, even though I didn’t have their bodies or their complete stories at my disposal,’ Letícia reflects. ‘The body became an archive, a vessel, a crossroads. I discovered that there is a memory that is not in books, but in the muscles, in the feet that tread the earth, in the breath that changes when certain names are mentioned. It was an experience of reconnecting with an ancestral lineage that is not only biological, but also political, symbolic and affective,’ concludes the filmmaker.
Filming in Porto was, for the artist, ‘a choice and also a gesture of confrontation’. Simões explains that Porto was one of the main centres for the financing and departure of slave ships. However, today it is a city where many black migrant women live, impacted by other forms of coloniality. By filming in the city, the director wanted to emphasise this historical permanence: ‘The black body, which used to be captured and taken away, now walks the streets, works, dreams and survives. The city of Porto appears in the film as the setting and character — sometimes complicit, sometimes resistant — of a history that is still being written.’
