Luanda e Sua Gente, Cidade Feiticeira: Representations of an Eternal Empire

Abstract

After World War I, cinema emerged as a powerful instrument of (counter) information for the colonial cause in the service of the European colonial powers, and Portugal was no exception. In fact, the use of cinema by the Portuguese authorities for colonial propaganda is the subject of this article. The aim of this study is to show how the post-war “winds of change” shifted the paradigm of the Portuguese colonial cinema by comparing the representation of Luanda in two colonial films about Angola produced in the 1950s and 1970s: Luanda, Cidade Feiticeira, (1950) and Luanda e a sua Gente (1973), respectively.