With the project Mangrove School, Filipa César leads an investigation which crosses the documentary gaze with a subjective perspective, focusing here on the relationship between history, memory, image and narrative, using the question of education as emancipation as the point of departure. She writes of this new film essay: “This time, we returned to Guinea-Bissau to research the student conditions in the guerrilla schools, deep within the mangrove. Very quickly, we ourselves became apprentices, and our first lesson was learning how to walk. If we walk in a straight line, placing our heels down first, we can easily slip and fall into the inundated rice paddy dykes of the mangrove, or we get stuck in the mud”.

Filipa César and Sonia Vaz Borges film these territories as infrastructures of an architecture network. In them, they inscribe young bodies in the process of learning, to whom the legacy of anticolonial struggle and the experience of this environment are taught. The filmmakers reconfigure the blueprint as a transmission space and as radical education, tuned into the memory of struggle. The film thereby becomes a manual for engagement with its branches.