Colonial Portugal and dictatorship through Cucha Carvalheiro’s childhood memories
The aunts, the mother, the father and a missionary priest evoke the summers lived in the grandmother’s house at the same time that news of the colonial war in Africa was recorded by letter or by old telephone.
The piece is entitled “Fonte da Raiva”, a lost land in the north of a gray Portugal, in which 5 sisters invent a life.
With no company to dance with, they are enchanted by the aerograms received by mail and have fun listening to “A voz da Saudade”, a radio line that broadcasts messages from Portuguese soldiers on a mission for their homeland.
In the middle, a presence you never see, that of little Amélia, a child who played around there, among nature and her aunt’s gifts and who, after all, is really the character in which the author and director Cucha Carvalheiro self-represents.
In this autobiographical show, “fracturing themes” are given voice, as the author tells RTP, such as “structural racism”, the dictatorship, the deaths of soldiers and the arrests of political activists.
the actor Bruno Huca he plays the father of little Amélia, better known as Zé Café, a mestizo born in Portugal and a student in Coimbra who will gain political awareness and aversion to the system.
Bruno is also the son of a Mozambican mother and a Portuguese father. He lived between Mozambique and Lisbon until he was 18 before stopping at the Conservatory to study theater in the capital.
He says that the story, despite showing “the Portugal of misery, at the same time also shows that there is this place “where” the search for happiness kept people alive”.
“It was a lot what my mother said: we were poor, miserable but we didn’t know it”.