Mozambican filmmaker Inadelso Cossa's is following up his First Appearance Competition-selected feature documentary debut with The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder. Both films excavate elements of his country's recent history which have been obscured.

In The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder, Cossa tells a very personal story, returning to the village he grew up in and confronting the fictions about the Mozambican civil war he was told as a child. “During the civil war in Mozambique, I spent the summertime in my grandmother's house. By day it was a paradise, but at night everything changed, because the rebels would attack the village. When I was woken up in the middle of the night to flee, my grandmother would reassure me by saying that all the noise was only fireworks. This idea of the fiction of war is personal, but it also represents the blind spot that still exists today; people downplay the importance of that period.”

The film follows Cossa in a process of discovering a part of his country's past that has been hidden, as he also did in his first feature-length documentary A Memory in Three Acts. “Both films revolve around me looking for answers, looking for why our history is not being taught in schools”, he says. “These memory exercises are my core as a filmmaker, I can't escape it. My past is done, now I'm doing a recovery, and I have to do it in a way that does justice to myself and to the country's history. Because we have fallen victim to a memory genocide. This also becomes personal, since my grandmother is now suffering from Alzheimer's. I'm up against time: I'm trying to construct a memory while her memory is fading out.”