Cesária Évora

World renowned performer Cesária Évora’s voice took her from poverty to stardom. With previously unseen footage and insights into the singer’s life, the film follows her struggles and success.

Cesária Évora made the music of the Cape Verde islands famous throughout the world in the early 1990s. This film is an introduction to the culture, music and zest for life of the Cape Verdean people. On the occasion of the famous carnival of Mindelno, on the island of São Vicente where Cesaria Évora was born, this documentary offers a musical journey to discover "Sodade" and its legacy. Cesaria Évora, who died in 2011 after a twenty-year career, has allowed Cape Verde to shine throughout the world. The "barefoot diva", considered the queen of the morna has conquered the world and inspired many Cape Verdean artists. The small archipelago, which was for several centuries an important hub of the slave trade has promoted since then an important ethnic mix, which has played an important role in the evolution of local music.

"Beti is a dancer in the Raiz di Polon company in Cape Verde. She receives an offer from Lisbon to join a Cape Verde music show and start a new career there. The offer unchains the deep-set Cape Verde conflict in her: identity built on the Diaspora century after century. Doubts, nostalgia, uprooting, they all soar over her and accompany her decision. The same dilemma that surrounds all Cape Verdeans, the yearning to leave, the yearning to return. Expressed and brought together around music, hallmark of the people of Cape Verde."

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Singer Cesaria Evora is the cultural ambassador and greatest star of her native country, Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony off the Northwestern coast of Africa. She excels at the highly stylized and emotionally intense ballad style known as the "morna," a melodramatic, mournful romantic music that is much like the Portuguese fado, full of beautiful, melancholy guitars and impassioned lyrics of love lost and life both savored and endured. For those of us unlucky enough to be unable to attend any of her concerts, here is a splendid presentation of Cesaria and her band, recorded live at the Zenith Theatre in Spring of 2001.

Singer Cesaria Evora is the cultural ambassador and greatest star of her native country, Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony off the Northwestern coast of Africa. She excels at the highly stylized and emotionally intense ballad style known as the "morna," a melodramatic, mournful romantic music that is much like the Portuguese fado, full of beautiful, melancholy guitars and impassioned lyrics of love lost and life both savored and endured. For those of us unlucky enough to be unable to attend any of her concerts, here is a splendid presentation of Cesaria and her band, recorded live at the Zenith Theatre in Spring of 2001.

This standard slice-of-life drama is about Dju Dibonga (Richard Courcet), a young man who leaves his home on Cabo Verde, an island of Portuguese dependency off the coast of Africa, to go to Luxembourg and search for his father. Far from his home village and unfamiliar with the large city, the young black man forms an unlikely friendship with a down-and-out white policeman whose only consolation in life is found at the bottom of a bottle. Their developing companionship forms the main focus of this movie directed by Pol Cruchten.