The Mirror and the Lens: Neusa Sousa’s Portrait of São Tomé and Príncipe

In the dense green interior of São Tomé, where village roads thread through banana groves and colonial memories fade beneath layers of daily life, filmmaker Neusa Sousa’s camera captures a different image of her country. Her new documentary, Caminho de Casa ("The Way Home"), is not about tourism, postcards, or lush landscapes—it is about intimacy, identity, and community.

Sousa’s film marks a significant moment in São Tomé and Príncipe’s cultural production. Released this year, Caminho de Casa offers a deeply personal lens on the islands, celebrating the territory, people, and everyday rhythms of Santomean life. The documentary departs from conventional storytelling about the nation, avoiding the clichés of exoticism or colonial nostalgia. Instead, it builds a portrait rooted in lived experience, focusing on the small, often overlooked moments that define a community.

Reclaiming the Narrative

For decades, São Tomé and Príncipe—one of the smallest countries in Africa—has existed at the margins of global media narratives. International coverage often reduces the nation to images of chocolate plantations, ecological reserves, or remote paradise. While these elements are part of the archipelago’s reality, they obscure its social complexities and the voices of its people.

Neusa Sousa’s work contributes to reversing this dynamic. By turning the camera inward, she positions her film as a tool of self-representation. Her documentary is not an external gaze but an internal reflection, prioritizing the voices, gestures, and memories of the Santomean community itself.

On Bantu Men, Sousa and her collaborators describe the film as an "intimate documentary that celebrates identity, territory, and the people of São Tomé and Príncipe from a personal and rooted perspective." This framing aligns with a broader wave of Lusophone filmmakers pushing for cinema that challenges extractive storytelling.

“I took a long time to release this documentary. Maybe I was waiting for this symbolic date. I’ve never believed in perfection—only in impact. This work is made with a lot of love, dedication, and pride in the country where I was born,”

She said upon the film’s release. The quote frames Caminho de Casa not as a polished product for export but as an urgent act of cultural presence—a record made for and with her own community.

Cinema from the Margins

The release of Caminho de Casa is especially significant given the historical invisibility of São Tomé and Príncipe in African cinema. Unlike larger Lusophone countries like Angola, Mozambique, or even Cape Verde, São Tomé has little infrastructure for film production. There are no major film schools, few public funding mechanisms, and limited exhibition spaces. The country’s last official cinema closed years ago.

Despite these obstacles, a new generation of artists is emerging, using small-scale productions, digital platforms, and community screenings to circulate their work. Sousa’s documentary fits within this grassroots cultural resurgence, positioning cinema as a form of memory-making and social reflection.

Her film resonates with what scholars call Afro-Atlantic counter-narratives—creative works that resist both colonial legacies and globalized erasure. In São Tomé, this also means confronting the remnants of Portuguese imperialism and addressing the gaps left by decades of under-documentation.

Everyday Archives

Rather than focusing on grand historical narratives, Sousa’s documentary foregrounds the mundane and the meaningful. The film captures daily life in towns like Trindade and Neves, recording the gestures of work, play, and ritual that often escape formal history. This attention to the ordinary transforms the documentary into an archive of the present, where cultural practices, oral traditions, and intergenerational memory are preserved on film.

This approach reflects a broader trend in postcolonial cinema, where the emphasis is not on spectacle but on slow observation and listening. By prioritizing community voices, Sousa’s work echoes the methodology of other Afro-Lusophone directors who seek to document life "from within," rather than for external consumption.

Cultural and Ecological Tensions

The timing of Caminho de Casa is particularly relevant. In 2025, UNESCO elevated parts of São Tomé and Príncipe’s ecosystems to World Heritage status, highlighting the islands' unique biodiversity. While this recognition is a source of national pride, it also raises concerns about eco-tourism, gentrification, and the potential commodification of local life.

Sousa’s documentary provides a necessary counterbalance. It reminds viewers that cultural heritage is not just about landscapes or international accolades—it’s about the people who live on the land, shape its stories, and carry its histories forward.

A Collective Reflection

At local screenings, audiences have responded to the film not as outsiders peering into their own culture but as participants in a shared narrative. Community members see their own lives projected onto the screen—not as objects of study but as subjects of memory.

This act of reflection is vital in small nations, where cultural production often depends on external validation. Sousa’s film suggests another path: one where the camera belongs to the people, where storytelling is not about consumption but about continuity.

Toward an Afro-Atlantic Cinema of Care

Neusa Sousa’s Caminho de Casa is more than a documentary—it is a cinema of care, a commitment to documenting the present for future generations. It joins a growing body of Lusophone Afro-Atlantic cinema that resists erasure and challenges global hierarchies of visibility.

In doing so, Sousa reclaims the narrative of São Tomé and Príncipe, not as a paradise for outsiders but as a living, breathing space of complexity, contradiction, and community. Her film asks a simple but radical question: Who gets to tell the story of home?