What The Soil Remembers
by José Cardoso
Ecuador, South Africa, 2023
synopsis
What the Soil Remembers examines the trauma of a community uprooted during the Apartheid regime, making way for an educational institution that would become synonymous with the foundation of white supremacist ideologies. The film follows a group of elders who illuminate the screen with their approach to the problem. The collective wisdom and patience embedded in their actions is what a nationalist regime tried to violently take away from them years earlier.
José Cardoso’s dynamic, beautifully glitching experimental documentary brings us intimately into a community uprooted by South Africa’s white supremacist institutions. Using fragmentation, layering, jump-cuts and an almost gleeful rebellion against convention, the film’s stylings reflect the ruptures of dislocation and the electric tenacity of resistance. Cardoso’s editing upends our expectations of expository film, and despite all odds leaves us raucous, rooting for and charmed by a grass-roots movement to reclaim what they can of a stolen history. – IFFR
about the director
José Cardoso, Seydú’s father, filmmaker, illustrator and graphic designer; he has developed fiction, animation and documentary films, on themes revolving around surrealism, consciousness and anti-colonialism. After being selected for his first feature film Iwianch, The Devil Deer at the 59th Ann Arbor Film Festival, he won the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker. His short documentary What the Soil Remembers won the IFFR Ammodo Tiger Short Film Award at IFFR Rotterdam 2023 and with his latest work “Flowers” won the Sheffield Doc Fest 2024 Short Film Award. He worked for BBC, 100 Women as film director of the chapter in Ecuador of the series: The Femicide Detectives.