Yara Costa Pereira – Wear your heritage well: it’s what you are

Turbo-powered versions of Islam and Christianity are threatening the peaceful co-existence of religions in Mozambique. Centuries of migration, trade and colonial domination have produced unique multicultural societies. Her films are her way of negotiating her identity in uncertain times.

In her earlier work she developed the idea of telling the stories that are not heard because they come from the experiences of minorities. Her first film (2011), “Why are they here – Chinese stories in Africa”, focused on the experiences of poor Chinese immigrants in three different African countries, and how they were accepted or not, what local communities said about them and to them, and how they felt about that.

Africa’s indigenous peoples suffered from the slave trade and then the ‘scramble for Africa’ by colonial powers in the 1880s. In the 1960s the non-aligned movement pushed back, and the Cuban intervention in Angola in the 1970s helped to end both Portuguese domination and Apartheid in South Africa. But liberation has given way to economic and soft powers rather than military interventions. These winds of change also ripple the surfaces of multicultural identities, and raise questions: return to roots, embrace creolisation – or be drawn into the puritanical machines that both major religions are busy installing.

There are active groups working on documentary cinema in Mozambique, although raising money is difficult.

The conflicts of identity in this film are less brutal than those in her film about Haiti and the Dominican Republic, “The Crossing” (2014), but intolerance and economic inequality are being propagated.

Yara talked about religion in Part 1, but sexuality is a connected issue, especially for Wahabi Islam.

This interview was published first in The Prisma Multicultural Newspaper on 3rd December 2018 and can be read in full with photographs here: https://theprisma.co.uk/2018/12/03/yara-costa-pereira-wear-your-heritage-well-its-what-you-are/