Air Conditioner (Fradique, 2020) (Patreon)

To my knowledge, this is the first film I have ever seen from the nation of Angola. 34-year-old Fradique (real name: Mário Bastos) studied in the U.S. and has made several shorts, and spent several years making a feature-length documentary, Independence, about Angola's titular struggle. Air Conditioner, which played Rotterdam and which I caught as part of the online We Are One festival, is the sort of highly accomplished debut that one usually finds in the Discovery or Contemporary World Cinema sections at TIFF. And one still might -- who knows? Its primary flaw is that it promises a bit more than it delivers, which is precisely what one likes to see in a debut film. Fradique is, as they say, "going places."

The film takes place over a couple of days in the capital city of Luanda. Although Air Conditioner is organized around a high-concept premise, the film itself is oddly loping and occasionally oneiric, following the shuffling itinerary of Matacedo (José Kiteculo), a maintenance man for a midrise apartment building. He and his friend, apartment manager Zézinha (Filomena Manuel), are under orders from an obnoxious bigwig who runs the building to find his missing window-unit air conditioner. Trouble is, air conditioners have been randomly falling out of windows throughout Luanda, several times a day. Pedestrians have been maimed, commerce is slowing down, and people are terrified. These events, presented like a sort of Buñuelian plague or simply the city rejecting mechanical attempts to make it more livable, are a matter-of-fact ordeal -- huge metal machines just falling out of the sky.

While Fradique is wise to avoid any specific allegorical significance to the AC downpour, he does tend to overstuff Air Conditioner with numerous ideas that, while intriguing, cannot be fully explored in the film's 75 minute span. Matacedo, for instance, possesses the ability to communicate with the building's Cape Verdean residents through telepathy. And while trying to track down the big boss's AC unit, he and Zézinha make a lengthy pit-stop in the fix-it shop of Mr. Mino (David Caracol), who has rigged an AC unit, a tape recorder, and some colored lights through an old automotive chassis to create a "memory machine," something that seems to be an allusion to cinema itself but is just dropped into the mix, never fully explored.

All that having been said, Fradique seems to be an artist bristling under the constraints of his financial and technical limitations. He is just bursting with ideas, and with Air Conditioner, he has issued an impressive opening volley. He made his film as though he'd never get the chance to make another. Let's hope he was wrong about that.

Note / Update: The perspicacious Brian Darr reminded me that I have in fact seen an Angolan film before -- just a few weeks ago, in fact. Sarah Maldoror's 1968 short film Monangambeee, a Sembene-influenced revolutionary work that I was quite impressed with. Gotta remember to check those logs....