Cartas para Angola

The Search for a Place Called Home

Abstract

This article examines the documentary Cartas para Angola (2011) directed by Julio Matos and Coraci Ruiz. The documentary has as its leitmotif the correspondence exchanged between a set of people whose lives are traced between Angola, Brazil, and Portugal.  Taking as a point of departure the notions of home and belonging and in dialogue with Fernando Arenas’s work, I investigate people’s relationship to places, expanding earlier conceptions on the ways places work to create a web of meanings in people’s lives. I argue that the existence of hybrid locations enables us to interrogate essentializing paradigms around notions of home and nation, exploring some of the tensions that characterize life in a globally interconnected world.