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Ike Bertels, dir. Guerilla Grannies: How to Live in This World. 2012. English, Portuguese, Yao, Nyanja (with English subtitles). 90 minutes. Burgdorf, Switzerland. DNU Films. $398.00. 2012.
As a student, Ike Bertels saw a film that would shape her career. The 1971 documentary Behind the Lines of the British solidarity activist Margaret Dickinson profiled the freedom fighters of FRELIMO, including a cadre of young women who had taken up arms against Portugal's colonial empire. For Bertels the film launched a journey to find and understand these women. The result of this quest is her first feature-length documentary, Guerilla Grannies, which captures the strength, compassion, and conviction of the three now elderly women who inspired a young Dutch filmmaker forty years ago.
The three women-Amelia Omar, Monica Chitupila, and Maria Sulilaunited to fight Portuguese colonialism before charting their own paths in postindependence Mozambique. Bertels chronicles their lives through a series of interviews conducted in 1984, on the eve of free elections in 1994, and most recently in 2011. Amelia entered the war as a teenager shortly after having her first child. She now makes a living from the proceeds of her farm supplemented by a pension, but she worries about her son's laziness even as she celebrates her educated daughter's accomplishments. Maria was the ambitious one, attaining the rank...