O Testamento Do Senhor Napumoceno (Napumoceno's Will) (1998)

1998. 110 minutes. Portugal / Cape Verde. Producer/Director: Francisco Manso. Feature Film

In Portuguese with English subtitles. The film is an epic, or at least an epic farce, from one of the world's least known but most culturally complex societies - Cape Verde. This classic tale of the hollowness at the core of provincial bourgeois life introduces English speaking audiences to Germano Almeida, one of the outstanding writers in Portuguese today. With its novelistic breadth, the film offers a bildungsroman of a man and a society so caught up in the pursuit of conventional success and prestige it overlooks its true self almost until it is too late.