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José Miguel Ribeiro’s feature debut “Nayola,” one of two Portuguese full-length animation pics screening at Annecy Animation Film Festival, portrays the fate of a grandmother, a mother and her daughter – Lelena, Nayola and Yara – in the aftermath of the Angolan civil war.

Nayola searches for her husband, Ekumbi, who went missing during the war. She abandons her daughter, Yara, at the age of only two, who is then brought up by her grandmother, Lelena. By 2011, she has become a rebellious teenage rapper.

The pic jumps back and forth between 1995 and 2011, moving between richly saturated images of the Angolan landscape and grim, gray-toned images of wartime destruction and urban decay, weaving together real-life settings and dreamscapes.

Based on the stage play “A Caixa Preta” (The Black Box), by Angolan playwright José Eduardo Agualusa and Mozambican novelist Mia Couto, the script was penned by Ribeiro’s long-time collaborator Virgilio Almeida.

The...

France’s Annecy International Animation Film Festival, the leading global get-together for all things animation, has unveiled the lineup for this year’s Work in Progress section, among the most highly anticipated events of the world’s animation calendar. When a physical event is possible, lines begin to form early in the morning as fans of the high-profile projects hope to get into the limited seating available at the Salle Pierre Lamy.

A barometer for future standout awards and/or box office success, recent high-profile projects featured at Annecy’s Work in Progress include Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Oscar-winner “Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse” and Oscar nominees in Netflix’s “Klaus” and “Over the Moon,” Cartoon Saloon’s “Wolfwalkers,” Claude Barras’ “My Life as a Zucchini,” Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar’s “Ernest & Celestine,” Michael Dudok de Wit’s “The Red Turtle” and Dean DeBlois’ “How to Train Your Dragon 2.

[Our thanks to Padrhig Harney for the following review]

With production from Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, Mozambique, and Brazil "The Last Flight of Flamingo" brings globalization and film together in an attempt to create a film unlike any other.

Director Joao Ribeiro's first crack at a feature film was a long time coming. In his early career he focused on production of films like "Ali" and "Blood Diamond". From 1992 he directed 3 Shorts "Tatana",  "Africa Dreaming", and  "Fogata" all based on original stories from the Mozambican writer Mia Couto. Of the many films at Piff this year Ribeiro's was most likely the strangest, blending African tradition and folklore into a narrative that in the end could not really add up to much of anything.

The film starts out with a mystery. A Un soldier has been killed and all that is left behind a blue helmet and his phallus. With great fan fair the Un general for the region swoops...

Sleepwalking Land (Terra Sonâmbula) is a vividly real film that tells a somewhat surreal story about life in Mozambique. The film is directed by Portuguese filmmaker Teresa Prata, based on the increasingly popular and well-respected 1992 novel of the same name by author Mia Couto. This is a movie deserving of a larger audience than it has currently been receiving, screened primarily at international film festivals.

Prata spent seven years making Sleepwalking Land, a feat that demands acknowledgment. The story is that of a young African boy named Muidinga, a name given to him by an elderly man named Tuihir (Aladino Jasse) who claims to have rescued Muindinga from his village before the armed bandits that plague the rural African landscape could capture or kill him. Muidinga (Nick Lauro Teresa) suffers memory loss as a result of eating spoiled yam root, so he’s naturally curious about his past.

As Muidinga and Uncle Tuihir,...