Miguel Carmo and José Filipe Costa were two of the ten screenwriters who worked on the film I Only Rest in the Storm, directed by Pedro Pinho, which premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the 78th Cannes Film Festival, dedicated to works with unique artistic visions.

The film follows the ‘tormented adventures’ of Sergio (Sérgio Coragem), an environmental engineer sent to Guinea-Bissau to ‘work as an environmental engineer for an NGO, building a road between the desert and the jungle’. It is there that he meets the Brazilian Gui (Jonathan Guilherme) and the Guinean Diara (Cleo Diára), with whom he establishes an ‘intimate but unbalanced relationship’. In Magazine HD, critic José Vieira Mendes describes ‘I Only Rest in the Storm’ as ‘a dense and unexpectedly sometimes even comic journey through West Africa, told through the eyes of Sérgio, a Portuguese engineer trying to find his place in a world that subtly rejects him’ and in which Pedro Pinho explores ‘colonial legacies with formal daring and moral complexity’. Cleo Diára won the Best Actress award in the Un Certain Regard section – an unprecedented feat.

But back to our researchers, we spoke to Miguel Carmo, a first-timer himself but experienced in environmental engineering and working in Guinea-Bissau, where he coordinated a development project to install manual water pumps in villages in the north of the country. This life experience, his friendship with Pedro Pinho and his interest in the debates ‘around the historical possibility of societies against the state (Pierre Clastres) on the West African coast’ were factors that led to the director inviting him to join the screenwriting team. Miguel also tells us that he learnt ‘a lot about the dynamics, techniques, and historical evolution of screenwriting’ and that, with Pedro Pinho, he had ‘brief lessons on narrative in cinema and screenwriting’. José Filipe Costa, ‘one of the most experienced writers in the group and very generous, surprised us countless times with very rich, intelligent and finished scenes,’ he adds.

Together with Miguel Carmo and José Filipe Costa, the screenwriters were Leonor Noivo, Luís Miguel Correia, Luísa Homem, Marta Lança, Miguel Seabra Lopes, Paul Choquet, Tiago Hespanha and Pedro Pinho himself.

Even before Cleo Diára was awarded the prize, Luc Chessel wrote in Libération that the film was ‘a kind of crazy masterpiece’, while Boris Bastide, in Le Monde, categorised it as ‘one of the most interesting proposals seen on the Croisette this year’. And this is also how history is brought into the public sphere.

Picture: I only rest in the storm (© Uma Pedra no Sapato / Terratreme Filmes)