Behind the picturesque façades and slow dolly shots, an entire population remained invisible: the children and grandchildren of the empire.
Cape Verdeans, Angolans, São Toméans, Guineans — communities whose lives built the post-colonial Lisbon we live in, but who rarely existed onscreen except as servants, immigrants, or metaphors for someone else’s guilt.

That silence is what curator and researcher Kitty Furtado calls “the colonial hangover of the image.” Her new film programme, “Black Gaze – Mostra de Cinema Negro em Portugal,” which unfolds this November at the Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, doesn’t simply fill that void; it detonates it.

“Black cinema in Portugal has a great future — in fact, it is the future of Portuguese cinema,” Furtado says.
It’s less prophecy than manifesto.

When the Camera Looks Back

The “Black Gaze” is not a genre — it’s a reversal of perspective.
It challenges the historical dynamic in which the colonized body is filmed by the colonizer’s eye.

Films like Denise Fernandes’s Nha Mila trace the emotional geography between Lisbon’s suburbs and the Atlantic crossings that made them.
Welket Bungué’s Calling Cabral turns the revolutionary figure Amílcar Cabral into a cinematic séance, confronting the amnesia of the Portuguese left.
And in Mónica de Miranda’s A Ilha (The Island), memory isn’t linear but tidal — ebbing between Luanda and Lisbon, between belonging and exile.

These films don’t plead for inclusion; they build a parallel canon.
They refuse to “represent” the Afro-Portuguese experience from the outside. Instead, they perform it — through fragmentary storytelling, ancestral soundscapes, and a refusal to obey Western narrative closure.

“The act of gazing is political,” Furtado explains.
“The Black Gaze reclaims that act — it’s an epistemological gesture, a way of knowing.”

The Architecture of Visibility

For decades, Portugal’s cinematic institutions functioned like mirrors facing only Europe. The country’s film school system, funding bodies, and festival circuits reflected a narrow idea of national identity — white, melancholic, masculine, obsessed with loss.

Meanwhile, a generation of Afro-descendant filmmakers shot their own stories with borrowed cameras, collective crews, and DIY editing suites.
Their screenings took place in neighborhood associations, cultural centers, and online platforms like BANTUMEN, far from the red-carpet glare of São Jorge Cinema.

“Black Gaze” brings these creators into one of Lisbon’s most established cultural spaces — the Gulbenkian Foundation — and that tension is deliberate.
It’s both a recognition and a confrontation: the institution hosting the critique of itself.

In one of the festival’s panels, an audience member asks whether this inclusion signals real change or just another museum-sized apology.
Furtado doesn’t flinch.

“I don’t want the Black Gaze to be assimilated. I want it to transform how we look — permanently.”

Between-Places, Ancestry, Street

The showcase unfolds in four curatorial “axes”:

• Between-Places explores hybrid identities and migratory dissonance.
• Memory & Ancestrality traces how personal archives become collective repair.
• Ecology & Feminism links environmental and bodily autonomy.
• Anti-Racism – Family & Street situates resistance in the domestic and the urban everyday.

Each screening becomes a small assembly of diaspora. Cape Verdean mothers, Angolan students, white cinephiles, kids with skateboards — all packed into CAM’s minimalist auditorium, whispering in Creole between subtitles.

Outside, Lisbon’s November air hums with that other rhythm — the city’s daily choreography of buses, languages, and uneven chances. Inside, the screen refracts it back.

The Sound of Unlearning

What distinguishes this new wave of Afro-Portuguese cinema isn’t just the image — it’s the sound. The hiss of wind through a Luandan apartment block, a whispered prayer over archival footage, the low thump of batida or funaná replacing orchestral strings.

Sound becomes a counter-narrator, undermining the visual order inherited from colonial cinema. In Hanami, Fernandes layers field recordings of ocean waves over Lisbon traffic, collapsing the distance between departure and arrival.
In Memória, Bungué uses silence like a weapon — moments where the absence of dialogue becomes the refusal to translate pain for white audiences.

This sonic insurgency connects Lisbon to other decolonial soundscapes — from Brazil’s baile funk documentaries to Ghana’s experimental video art — creating a transatlantic chorus of disobedience.

History Isn’t Over; It’s Just Poorly Edited

Portugal often congratulates itself on “peaceful decolonization,” on the poetry of return. But the country’s present tells another story: Black bodies still over-policed, African names still ridiculed in schools, and immigrant neighborhoods still branded as “problematic zones.”

The cinema born out of this context doesn’t seek reconciliation.
It exposes continuity — between the plantation and the factory, the missionary and the filmmaker, the border guard and the film censor.

The Black Gaze insists that colonialism didn’t end in 1975; it just changed its frame rate.

Futures Filmed From Below

What’s striking about this movement is its refusal of despair.
In a world drowning in dystopias, these directors film the future as something already growing in the cracks.

Young filmmakers like Sílvia Fortes and Djamila Oliveira are already extending Furtado’s concept into the speculative — mixing Creole mythologies with cyber-documentary forms.
Their work imagines a Lisbon where ancestry and technology merge, where the ghost of Cabral uploads itself into the cloud.

It’s Afrofuturism without the export label — an insistence that the future of Portugal’s image belongs to those it once refused to see.

Why It Matters Beyond Portugal

What’s happening at Gulbenkian mirrors a larger shift across Europe’s peripheries.
In France, Alice Diop reframes citizenship through documentary.
In the UK, Steve McQueen turns archives into liberation.
In Belgium, Baloji reimagines colonial ghosts through music and myth.

Portugal, late to the reckoning, now finds itself at a crossroads:
Either it embraces the multiplicity of its cinema or it remains trapped in monochrome nostalgia.

The “Black Gaze” doesn’t ask politely.
It stares back — demanding a new cinematic contract between those who watch and those who are watched.

The Future Will Be Shot in Creole

By the end of the final screening, applause fills the CAM auditorium — not the polite kind, but the collective exhale of recognition.
Someone says, “We’ve never seen ourselves here before.”
That’s the quiet revolution Furtado was aiming for.

Because once you’ve been seen, you can’t go back to being an extra.
Once the lens shifts, the entire frame of a nation follows.

Black cinema in Portugal isn’t an appendix to European film history.
It’s the correction — the necessary edit.
And if Kitty Furtado is right, it’s already the next chapter.

Black Gaze – Mostra de Cinema Negro em Portugal
8, 9, 15 & 16 November 2025
Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, Lisbon
Curated by Kitty Furtado
Featuring Denise Fernandes, Welket Bungué, Mónica de Miranda, Pocas Pascoal & others