Domingos Marengula

Buenos Aires. Exe, 25 years old, has just lost his job and is not looking for another one. His neighbors and friends seem as odd to him as they always do. Online, he meets Alf, a boy from Mozambique who is also bored with his job and who is about to follow Archie, another boy who has run away into the jungle. Through the dense vegetation of the forest, Archie tracks ants back to their nest. One of them wanders off course and comes across Canh, a Filipino, sitting on top of a giant heap of earth and who is about to go back to his strange, beautiful home town, where he too has a miserable job.

In 2020, unable to travel, Ico Costa left a small camera with Ailucha and Domy, two young Mozambicans from the city of Inhambane, and asked them to film their daily lives. The result: working, playing, walking, hanging around, smoking, listening to music, singing, dancing, feeling desire – being teenagers.

Shooting on 16mm film in Mozambique, director Ico Costa explores the textures of human behaviour as he follows young men who wonder what lies beyond their immediate surroundings. In the fragments of conversations captured in the Maputo market, a recording studio and on coconut trees, we find daily routines and tedium lead to chit-chat on desire, money and hope. In the interplay between performance and document, poetry emerges from fleeting everyday moments.

Domingos and Neusia are a young couple from a small city in Mozambique. She goes to school, he has an underpaid job at a car wash. Yearning for a better life, Domingos sets on a journey through Mozambique, heading to the gold mines in the north of the country. In the meantime, Neusia waits at home.