“I was born in Africa, but I went to Europe in my adolescence. My mother was left behind.” It is with this sentence and to the sound of “Hope To Meet You” that “Serpentário” begins, Carlos Conceição’s latest work, premiered world-wide in the last edition of Berlinale. The traveler, nameless in the narrative, comes from the sky, like an angel returning to earth searching for a past time or a possible redemption. The story advances through an alternated narration, between the unnamed protagonist’s voice and the female one, of whom we do not know the face or the condition. Embodying a Sebastian figure, the traveler recalls the caravels, the patterns marked, the first clashes with the native populations. As he proceeds his journey, he explores the territory cartography through a mix of family memories (the arrival of his family in Angola), cinephile memories (the western and the conquest of “uncivilized” lands) and historical memories (the liberation struggles in 1960s and the consequent independence). His dreams haunt him, chased by the ghosts of the past. He meets an anonymous person that gives him hitch-hiking, of whom we do not see the face but we recognize the voice of the filmmaker himself, who alerts him to some borders that cannot be crossed. The traveler is looking for his mother, who he left behind when he traveled to Europe, but finds nothing, only ruins and vestiges of a territory destroyed by the conflicts of the past. Finally, he finds a blue and yellow parrot singing with his mother’s voice, but the meeting will not bring the answers that the traveler was waiting for. There is an undeniably autobiographical dimension that we had already seen in “Acorda, Leviatã”, symbolically assumed in the relationship between Conceição and Angola, where she was born and lived until she was 12 years old. “Serpentário” explores this return to the south of the Sun’s land, where Conceição seeks to work post-memory, personal and family, through cinema: with an allegorical load, the film proposes a journey of a young man (performed by João Arrais) across the Angolan territory in search of his missing mother, oscillating between past and future. The film’s title alludes to zodiac, more specifically to its thirteenth and most controversial sign (Ophiuchus), which Greek mythology associates with resurrection, and which Conceição seems to associate with a resumption of her affective relationship with the land of birth, from which she moved away during adolescence. (PC)