This trilingual DVD-edition O Mundo em Imagens - Filmes do Arquivo do Instituto Nacional de Audiovisual e Cinema (dt: Bilderwelten - Filme aus dem Archiv des INAC / engl: Views of the World - Films from the Archive of INAC) contains the film "O Tempo Dos Leopardos" (Mozambique & Jugoslavia, 1985)
Due to the will of bringing the national film production to a different level, and because there were some national imperatives on presenting our history, the Ministry of Information and the National Film Institute decided to contact Yugoslavia for the production of the first post-independence fiction film. The Mozambican Ministry of Information and the Yugoslavian Ministry of Culture accepted to co-produce a first fiction feature film. For the Yugoslavian part the production company AVALA Film was chosen, and Mozambique appointed the INC.
The story of the film should be one or several episodes of Mozambique’s Liberation Struggle. The AVALA Film chose Zdravco Velimirović as screenwriter and director, and the INC appointed Luís Carlos Patraquim and Licínio Azevedo to work on the screenplay. Licínio had already published the book Stories of the Armed People, based on episodes of the struggle told by guerilla soldiers. Scriptwriters and director met in Belgrade and set out to write the screenplay. At the beginning with great difficulties, since they started from different perspectives.
This stage being completed, a big production team was gathered, involving Yugoslavians and Mozambicans, starting all the tasks of scouting, costume design and casting. At that time in Mozambique there wasn’t one single professional film actor. It was necessary to search for actors in theatre groups of state owned companies, and in small emerge amateur theatre companies. All this process was initiated at a moment when Mozambique was going through a ferocious “guerra de desestablização” and when there were all sorts of restrictions: water, food,
electricity, transport, fuel, and other essential resources for a film production of such a dimension. Due to the difficulty of finding locations with the demanded security and best conditions among the wide spread warfare the country experienced, it was agreed upon to film most of the movie on Inhaka island (during three months) and on the Xefina island (for one month).
This extended DVD-edition was comissioned by the university of Bayreuth and funded by the program "Kulturerhalt" (Preservation of cultural heritage) of the Federal Foreign Office. It is an cooperation between INAC, the department o Romance Studies of the university of Bayreuth (under the direction of Prof. Dr. Ute Fendler), the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, Maputo, and ICMA (Instituto Cultural Mocambique-Alemanha), Maputo.
For all questions regarding this DVD, including purchase information, please contact Prof.Dr. Ute Fendler at Bayreuth University. Prof. Fendler is the initiator and research coordinator of this project.
Arcadia Filmproduktion was responsible for the DVD-production: project-coordination, digitization, digital film-restoration, subtitling and revision; the layout was created by Bettina Grünert, lichtgruen.de.