Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Pinho’s monumental three-and-a-half-hour film, “O Riso e a Faca (I Only Rest in the Storm),” confronts the systems of power that shape the world today. A prize-winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where lead actress Cleo Diára won the Best Performance award in the Un Certain Regard section, the film will have its North American premiere at the 63rd New York Film Festival, running September 26 to October 13. It rejects easy answers, narrative comfort, and moral simplification, demanding sustained intellectual and emotional engagement from its audience.
Unfolding over a sprawling narrative and polyphonic structure, “O Riso e a Faca” exposes the enduring, often hidden mechanisms of domination that structure global life, establishing it as one of the more dynamic works of political cinema at its level in recent years.
The film’s story core is simple on its surface: Sérgio (Sérgio Coragem), a Portuguese environmental engineer, is dispatched to Guinea-Bissau to complete an environmental impact report for a major road-building project. This seemingly straightforward premise becomes, in Pinho’s hands, a scalpel for dissecting the anatomy of neo-colonialism today. Sérgio is not a villain in the traditional sense; rather, he is the embodiment of the well-intentioned European, armed with technical expertise and a vague desire to “help,” yet utterly blind to the complex social, political, and historical realities of the context in which he operates.
Pinho himself has articulated this intention clearly, stating that the film seeks to explore “the relationship between Europe and the rest of the world, and Europe’s global dominance and hegemony,” particularly how international aid and NGO work can perpetuate contemporary power imbalances. The road project, a classic symbol of “development” and “progress,” is revealed to be a deeply ambiguous undertaking. While it promises connectivity, it also threatens to displace communities, disrupt traditional ways of life, and facilitate the extraction of resources—a continuation of colonial exploitation under a new guise.
As Pinho notes, powerful interests travel to villages in northern Guinea-Bissau to mine rare sands, displace entire communities, contaminate water sources, exploit labor, and continue resource extraction as they have for centuries. Sérgio’s report, therefore, is not a neutral scientific document but a tool of control, capable of legitimizing or halting this process.
One of the film’s most radical and successful strategies is its rejection of a singular narrative perspective. Pinho constructs what he calls a “polyphony” of voices, a cacophony of competing, often contradictory, viewpoints that challenge the traditional “authority” of the European protagonist. The film’s extended 217-minute runtime is not an indulgence but a necessity, allowing these multiple perspectives to unfold with patience and complexity. We hear from the local communities who will be displaced by the road, the Bissau-Guinean elite who stand to profit from it, and the expatriate workers who navigate their own complicated positions within this ecosystem.
This polyphonic structure is most powerfully embodied in the character of Diára, brought to life with ferocity and charisma by Cleo Diára. As a local bar owner and businesswoman, Diára serves as the film’s moral and intellectual anchor, constantly challenging Sérgio’s naivete and forcing him to confront the implications of his presence. Her crackling performance provides a vital counter-narrative to Sérgio’s passive and often frustratingly inert perspective. It is through Diára, and the sharp-witted Gui (Jonathan Guilherme), that the film gives voice to the colonized, not as passive victims but as active, critical agents in their own story.
The polyphonic structure gives attention to Guinea-Bissau’s multilingual reality—a fluidity that contrasts with a more monolithic cultural model across European countries. Consequently, Sérgio’s inability to move between these codes becomes a metaphor for Europe’s broader incapacity to grasp African contexts.
“O Riso e a Faca” is a film deeply embedded in the historical context of Guinea-Bissau. The legacy of Portuguese colonialism, which only ended after a brutal and protracted war of independence led by the visionary Amílcar Cabral, hangs heavy over every frame. The film wisely avoids a didactic history lesson, instead showing how the past bleeds into the present. The political instability, economic precarity, and social tensions that plague contemporary Guinea-Bissau are not presented as inherent failures but as the direct and ongoing consequences of centuries of colonial exploitation.
It is not a historical drama about the evils of the past but a contemporary thriller, in a sense, about the persistence of those evils in new, more insidious forms. The power imbalance between Sérgio and the Bissau-Guineans he encounters is a direct echo of the colonial relationship, forcing the audience to recognize that colonial dominance endured long after formal colonial rule ended.
Nowhere are these power dynamics more starkly illustrated than in the film’s frank and often graphic depiction of sexuality. Sérgio’s intimate relationships with Diára and Gui are not romantic subplots—in fact, I’m not sure they are meant to be romantic at all—but political arenas where the imbalances of race, class, and nationality are played out on the terrain of the body. Pinho ties these dynamics directly to desire, suggesting that power inequalities, however concealed, inevitably surface in intimate relations.
The film’s most talked-about scene, a threesome involving Sérgio, Diára, and Gui, quite literally lays bare its political argument. It is a scene that is simultaneously erotic, tender, and unsettling, visually articulating the fetishization of Sérgio’s racial autonomy and the complex ways in which desire and power are intertwined. The film refuses to sanitize these encounters, forcing the viewer to confront the uncomfortable reality that even the most intimate moments can be shaped by the long shadow of colonial history.
Drawing on his documentary background, Pinho uses long, handheld shots that blur fiction and reality, immersing viewers in the social dynamics at play. Cinematographer Ivo Lopes Araújo captures both the sweltering heat of Guinea-Bissau and the claustrophobic tension of cross-cultural encounters. Casting largely via social media, Pinho sought non-professional actors whose lived experience lends spontaneity and conviction—especially in the film’s charged conversations on politics, identity, and power.
“O Riso e a Faca” is not an easy film to watch. Its length is demanding, its narrative is often elliptical, and its protagonist is intentionally frustrating. Its ambition occasionally outstrips its grasp, leading to moments of didacticism or a seeming lack of focus. Yet, these are minor quibbles in the face of the film’s overall achievement. Pedro Pinho has crafted a rigorous and courageous work that candidly confronts the uncomfortable truths of our time.
In an era of resurgent nationalism, deepening global inequality, and escalating environmental crisis, “O Riso e a Faca” is a reminder that the past is never past, and that the structures of power that have shaped our world for centuries continue to operate in plain sight, often under the guise of progress and development. It does not allow us to rest, but instead, like its title suggests, finds its purpose in the heart of the storm.
Pedro Pinho’s 217-minute Cannes Un Certain Regard prize-winner, “O Riso e a Faca (I Only Rest in the Storm),” will have its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival on Sunday, October 5, at 6 p.m. with Q&As featuring Pinho and lead actress Cleo Diára.
I interviewed Diára soon after the film’s Cannes premiere in May. Read that newsletter here.