Fradique, Director, Writer 

Sloan Grant(s) Received: 2023, SFFILM, Science in Cinema Fellowship

Project Type: Feature 

Genre: Adventure

Length: 100 minutes

Field of Science: Biology and Unconventional Computing

Stage: Development 

Synopsis: 

Angola is in collapse. A decade after losing its main source of income—oil—the country is in crisis. Its capital, Luanda, is battered by constant floods, strange tremors, and a creeping fungal infestation. Power remains in the hands of a decaying, oppressive ruling Party. In this fragile world, TwentyEight, a melancholic young stamp painter at the National Archive, struggles with chronic nausea and grief over the recent death of his brother. He avoids the funeral and the bitter mourning of his mother, Rosa, who numbs her sorrow with alcohol.

Upon returning to work, TwentyEight is abruptly recruited by Lina, a high-ranking Party official, for a critical mission: track down Zoila, a long-lost Cuban biologist who disappeared 30 years ago, infiltrate her underground movement, and destroy any materials that could fuel subversive propaganda. Decades earlier, Zoila led a secret socialist-era expedition meant to forge a new capital for Angola—a dream that ended in political purges, arrests, and mass disappearances.
With no way out, TwentyEight leaves the oppressive city behind. In the countryside, he meets Luena, a spirited young member of the underground movement and Zoila’s goddaughter. Hiding the real reason for his mission, TwentyEight learns that Luanda has been violently torn from the continent and is now drifting in the Atlantic Ocean. The shocking event fuels a separatist movement calling for Angola’s independence from Luanda, and the capital’s displaced residents are urged to return home.

TwentyEight longs to go back. Luena agrees to help.
As they travel through forgotten towns, they find Zoila—now an aging recluse living in isolation. Suspicious but ultimately cooperative, she agrees to lead TwentyEight to a distant port city under one condition: he must leave Luena behind and help her reactivate her strange, fungus-powered computer from the 1970s. On their journey, they encounter former comrades from the failed expedition: a topographer-turned-musical-instrument restorer; an architect who runs a bar-funeral-home for musicians; and a doctor who heals through cinema. Each meeting resurfaces old wounds and reveals how Zoila’s machine once tore the group apart—some wanted to find the disappeared, while others sought to erase Luanda from Angola entirely.

Haunted by loss and disillusionment, TwentyEight and Zoila begin to open up to each other. Zoila suspects the mysterious fungi may have caused Luanda’s detachment. TwentyEight confesses the truth: he was sent by Lina to sabotage her. Devastated, Zoila abandons him.
But TwentyEight refuses to return to a Luanda that no longer exists. Chasing her across the desert in a dreamlike journey that distorts time and memory, he finds Zoila near death and carries her to an island with a village buried in sand, where she finds peace at last.

In a final act of healing, TwentyEight picks up a broken phone and dials his mother. To his surprise, she answers. In that moment, he begins his own transformation—leaving behind the ruins of Luanda to embrace an uncertain but open-ended future in a fractured land where memory, identity, and nature are deeply entwined.