A rather interesting thing happens over the last two scenes of Sana Na N’Hada’s Nome, which showed as part of the 2025 Locarno Film Festival’s Open Doors screenings. The choices made by the Guinean director over those two scenes—first, a fictional one of restraint, followed by footage of women throwing flowers in the sea—takes the film from a work just above average to a masterwork.
Somehow, those scenes, on an emotional and intellectual level emphasise themes the Bissau Guinean writer-director makes across the film’s runtime: that people who are wickedly thrust into a war not of their design can themselves be wicked, that strife doesn’t necessarily install saintliness or harmlessness into the individual who has endured suffering. That while African wars may produce heroes, they’ve never really produced statesmen.
Because the film is set during an African war, Nome inevitably is one of the many African films about Africa’s numerous problems—but taken on its own merits, this N’Hada work is a solid piece of filmmaking. It premiered at the ACID section of Cannes in 2023 but this is a film so well made that it could been programmed in the Competition category without too many complaints.
The film itself informs the viewer that N’Hada was one of a few Bissau Guinean filmmakers sent by his country’s government to Cuba to learn filmmaking, so they could tell the country’s story—it is why this film has quality footage. From this evidence, N’Hada imbibed the right lessons. And yet, it is hoped that given Africa’s face of pain in international cinema circles, he directs some of his attention to something other than conflict. War is obviously a significant part of Africa’s history, regardless of country—but so is glee.
Sana Na N’Hada’s tells the story of Guinea Bissau through the life and times of his eponymous hero, carried along by the magnificent performance of actor Marcelino Antonio Ingira.
Efiko Score: 8/10
Nome is the story of the titular character from his beginnings as a laggard child criticised by his mother to a soldier and then to a government official. His treatment of his girlfriend, Nambu, comes under examination along the way, giving this war-preoccupied film a romantic interlude.
In one scene, Nome comes to Nambu at night, urging her to come count the stars with him. At first, this seems like a vaguely asexual invitation but a short while later, Nambu announces that she has become pregnant, alluding to the non-stellar portion of their nighttime liaisons. It is at this point Nome decides to join the war engulfing his country. It is the 1960s after all, that decade of near-constant violent conflict across the continent. Somehow, for Nome, the thought of raising a child is more challenging than war.
At that point, the film splits into two. Nome wends through the brutality of war as Nambu trudges through an existence that’s brutal in its own way. This gives the film expansive epic quality, although Nome, as the film’s focus, remains the better drawn character. During the war, he makes some friends, all of whom would come to play a part in his life after the war. In a manner reminiscent of the friends in Achebe’s 1987 novel, Anthills of the Savannah, the ethical/ideological difference between some of the men come to have implications for the country and for their friendship. In both cases, violence, of a particularly masculine form, is unavoidable. It is in resolving (or dissolving) the difference between the men that the film arrives at its last two striking scenes.
Away from the men, Nambu experiences violence of both a typically masculine kind—a man who shows her kindness becomes victim of the war—and also of a maternal kind, as her parturition process is lonely and perhaps more painful than necessary. As Nambu, Binete Undonque is utterly believable, from her initial appearance as a village belle to a woman roughed up by wartime strife. Still, this is Marcelino Antonio Ingira’s show as Nome. The actor is exceptional as Nome, somehow managing to appear as a random young man, a lusty loverboy, a dusty soldier, and a plain but ambitious civil servant over the course of the story told by N’Hada. By sheer skill, Ingira holds Nome together, helped by a superb screenplay and João Ribeiro’s sublime cinematography.
Hovering alongside the film’s main characters is a spirit that serves as a kind of conscience, providing voiceover commentary for some incidents in the picture. It is not an entirely useful device because a lot of what happens in the course of the decades covered in the film could proceed just as effectively without editorialising but it is hard to argue against the usefulness of an entity that, right at the start of the picture, utters poetry: “This sky was six years younger when the war began.”
Without that mysticism, N’Hada’s storytelling is in two registers. There’s a realist drama on the one hand (pre-war and parts of the postwar period) and a soap opera on the other (part of the postwar period). The realist fragments are superior part but, broadly, N’Hada keeps both registers in fine form as he tells this epic tale of the disintegration of a country, a couple, and a conscience.
