Mário, an Entangled Life

Who was Mário Pinto de Andrade? An activist, a writer, a father, a guerrilla, a politician, a partner, a traveler, a dreamer, a sociologist, a friend, an editor, and much more. In the documentary, Mário (2024), Afro-American director Billy Woodberry tries to shed light on this enigmatic figure. This is his third documentary after Marseille aprés la guerre (2005), And When I Die, I Won’t Stay Dead (2015) and A Story from Africa (2019), after the success of his earlier feature, Bless Their Little Hearts (1983). Drawing upon an incredible amount of archival material and through interviews with friends, colleagues, and family, the legacy and relevance of one of the most important, yet understudied, anticolonial intellectuals of the 20th century start emerging. Nevertheless, this excavation seems to remain only on the surface. Mário entangles in a somehow too linear narrative a man who has crossed continents and epochs leaving relevant traces but somehow slipping through the folds of history.

Mário Pinto de Andrade was born in Portuguese-occupied Angola in 1928. Son of public functionaries, he attends a missionary school. In 1948 he moved to Lisbon to study classic philology. In the Casa dos Estudiantes dos Império (House of Students of the Empire), home to students from the Portuguese colonies, Mário accessed a transnational community of anticolonial thinkers in the making. There he met Agostinho Neto, Lúcio Lara, Alda do Espirito Santo and Amílcar Cabral. They exchanged their experiences as colonial subjects in their respective home countries. This alimented the circulation of anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonial ideas among them. As time passed by, the aspiration to achieve freedom and national independence became more and more pressing, pushing most of them to pass from theory to practice. Embracing armed struggle was accompanied by the firm idea that cultural emancipation was an integral part of such a process and a weapon to fight not only the colonialist oppressor but also their own alienation. As political mobilization sped up inside the empire, the students’ activism started attracting the attention of the Portuguese secret Police (PIDE) who increased repressive measures and started arresting some of those young activists.

At this point, Pinto de Andrade decided to move to Paris, where he worked for the publishing house Présence Africaine getting in touch with the negritude movement and intellectuals like Aimée Cesaire and Frantz Fanon. He would help organize the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists at Sorbonne in 1956. During those Parisian years, he met and fell in love with film director Sarah Maldoror for whose movies, like Sambinzanga, he will help write the script. In 1956 the MPLA, the movement for the popular liberation of Angola, was founded. Mario became its president shortly before the beginning of the armed struggle, in which he took part, against the Portuguese occupation. Between 1964 and 1970, Mario and Sarah, with their two daughters, moved to Algier. In those years he participates in important transnational events of the Third World, like the Tricontinental Conference of Havana (1966) and the Pan African Festival of Algier (1969).

So far so good, then the water starts to muddle. As the day of Angolan independence approached, divisions started sharpening within the MPLA. At least this is what emerges from the historiography available so far. Instead, the documentary follows a rather linear narration, backed up mainly by the interviews with one of the co-founders of “Revolta Activa”, a dissident movement born inside the MPLA. While the recent history of independent Angola and how the internal divisions played out within the new governing party are topics still under scrutiny among contemporary historians, what is sure is that Mario Pinto de Andrade lived in exile most of his life and died in 1990. Establishing causality and consequentiality between these two facts is not an easy equation. And even if a correlation exists, its precise channels might be more complex than expected.

Therefore, a simple yet central question emerges: how far can a documentary, even when building upon unedited material and exclusive interviews, really shed new light on a biography? What are the risks of involuntary mystification, in the attempt to bring new attention to one of the key figures of Angolan decolonial history? The wise editing by Luís Nunes, the simplicity of the graphics, and the neat aesthetic, accompanied by Luís Zhang and André Fèvre immersive soundscape, leads the spectator to absorb without qualms this impeccable production. Two elements contributed to the rendering of such a smooth narration. Pinto de Andrade was a dedicated archivist who created an impressive private archive, which stands out even more if considering the transnational dimension of his biography. Nevertheless, there might have been information and documents he couldn’t or didn’t want to save for posterity. The other element might have been the shrunk distance between the director and the subject. Did the master of black independent cinema maybe see a bit of himself in Mário? At least, the struggle for beauty and justice seems to have carried and inspired both.