O Processo: Angola’s Unfinished Independence, Seen Through an Unforgiving Lens

Fifty years after Angola tore itself free from Portuguese rule, the country is being asked to revisit the moment of birth — not with fireworks or official parades, but with a slow, deliberate act of memory. O Processo, a new hybrid series blending documentary, fiction, and archival material, refuses to let history remain embalmed. It digs it up, examines the bruises, and asks what liberation means when the wounds still shape the present.

Created by filmmaker Hélder Filipe and producer Gianni Gaspar Martins, with writing and direction by Renata Torres, the project isn’t interested in the neat, state-sanctioned version of independence. Instead, it threads together photographs, staged reconstructions, and testimony from those usually relegated to the margins of history books — rank-and-file fighters, women organisers, exiles, the young who came of age in exile, the old who never stopped waiting.

The series begins with the trial that gives it its name — a judicial theatre that exposed the contradictions of a revolution still in its infancy. For Martins, the story is personal: his grandfather Sebastião stood among the accused; his grandmother Antónia carried the weight of survival. “It’s more than a series,” he says. “It’s a conversation between past, present, and future.”

The politics of remembering

Angola’s independence narrative is often told as a straight line — a clean break from colonialism, a singular victory. O Processo smashes that illusion. In its place, we get a mosaic: liberation leaders and anonymous soldiers, victories tainted by repression, and an independence that remains, in the words of the series, “an unfinished process.”

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a refusal to forget.

The show invites viewers to see independence not as a historical endpoint, but as a living, contested project — one still shaped by the same forces of inequality, power, and silence that defined its earliest days.

More than Netflix and chill

The release strategy rejects the passive consumption of streaming culture. Beyond Angola’s September 4 premiere, O Processo will travel to Mozambique, São Tomé, Brazil, Cape Verde, and Portugal. Screenings will double as public forums — part history lesson, part group therapy, part political seminar — with historians, artists, and community leaders unpacking each episode.

It’s an approach that treats film as a social intervention, not just entertainment. The project arrives at a moment when Angola is cautiously reassessing its own history, shedding some of the nationalist gloss for a more critical maturity.

Why it matters now

In the year of a golden anniversary, governments tend to choreograph a celebration. O Processo instead stages a reckoning. By resurrecting voices that power preferred to silence — women, base militants, the disappeared — it asks a question that still burns: what is the worth of independence if its promises remain unfulfilled?

The series doesn’t give easy answers. Instead, it hands the mic to those who lived the contradictions and survived them, reminding us that history is not a relic; it’s an open case file.