Flora Gomes

Flora Gomes is a Bissau-Guinean film director. He was born in Cadique, Guinea-Bissau on 31 December 1949 and after high school in Cuba, he decided to study film at the Instituto Cubano del Arte y la Industria Cinematográficos in Havana.

Shot fourteen years after independence, Gomes's Mortu Nega (Death Denied) (1988) was the first fiction film and the second feature film ever made in Guinea-Bissau. (The first feature film was N’tturudu, by director Umban u’Kest in 1987.) At FESPACO 1989, the film won the prestigious Oumarou Ganda Prize. Mortu Nega is in Creole with English subtitles.

In 1992, Gomes directed Udju Azul di Yonta, which was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival.

Son of illiterate parents, as a child Gomes struggled against the limitations of his social status and the oppression of the Portuguese colonial system under António Salazar's rule. He supported Bissau-Guinean resistance against colonialism and greatly admired Amílcar Cabral. He left Guinea-Bissau to study cinema in Cuba (1972) at the Cuban Institute of Art and Cinematography, under the guidance of Santiago Álvarez. He continued his studies in Senegal, at the Senegalese Journal for Motion Picture News, under the direction of Paulin Soumanou Vieyra. He also co-directed two films with Sergio Pina and worked as an assistant with Chris Marker and Anita Fernandez.

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