PT|EN

AIR CONDITIONER

FICTION | ANGOLA | 2020 | 72 MIN |

Director: Fradique

Producer: Jorge Cohen

Script: Fradique & Ery Claver

Line Producer and Art Dir.: Prudênciana Hach

DOP: Ery Claver

Original Music: Aline Frazão

Guest Artist: Rui Magalhães

SYNOPSIS

When the air-conditioners in the city of Luanda mysteriously began to fall, Matacedo (security guard) and Zezinha (maid) embarked on a mission to retrieve the boss’s AC by the end of the day. This mission leads them to Kota Mino’s electrical supply store, which is secretly assembling a complex memory retrieval machine.

“Air Conditioner” is a journey of mystery and reality, a critique of social classes and how we live together in vertical hopes, in the heart of a city that is past-present-future.

DIRECTOR’S NOTE

A reminder that our city is made up of people, memories and not empty, glazed skyscrapers, inspired by soap operas or American films.

This movie is about buildings and all the “transparent people” who work and build their lives in them everyday.

I grew up and lived in different ancient buildings in central Luanda. Matacedo is a character that embodies and reflects the state of inertia and, at the same time, of hope, pertaining to the vertical dystopias in which we live. In these buildings, each person dreams of the house they want and scramble for the memories they don’t have.

In these buildings, the elevators are made of bricks and trees grow out of the walls - our neorealism is pure magic. My desire is that the film may now join the fallen air conditioners and be part of the living memory of this city.

THE BUILDING

It is in one of these buildings located on Rainha Ginga Street, in one of Mutamba’s avenues at the heart of Luanda, that the narrative unfolds. Just like Matacedo and Zezinha, the building is also a main character with all its ramifications and infiltrations.

Like many other buildings from the 1950s, during the colonial period, ours is now worn out by time, history, individual salvation. In it, the cramped rooms, designed for one occupant only, have been reconfigured to house whole families, the remaining part of the terrace that is still unoccupied by makeshift rooms has become a football field where children play between the clothes left out to dry and the back yards were converted into repositories of power generators, water tanks and pumps, tangled pipes and electrical wires which, on its own, put together a scenario - real, unreal, surreal - ready to film. You risk crumbling, yes! but they carry a part of us, a sample of our society, dictate the pulse of this city and force us, albeit unwillingly, to live together.

This film is one of many reflections on the city of Luanda, object of unplanned urban sprawl, the result of a civil war that lasted nearly three decades that led a forced exodus into the capital. Rampant growth has left profound sequels not only in buildings, but fundamentally in people. It is this urban contemporary reality, so well portrayed in books like Ondjaki’s Transparent or Cafuxi’s pictures, to whom we owe all the photos in this press kit and in the opening credits of the film, which we invite you to discover.