Trading Cities

North American Premiere | Q&A with Luísa Homem & Pedro Pinho

The first collaboration between Portuguese documentarians Luísa Homem and Pedro Pinho is a masterpiece of social observation comparable to the Direct Cinema of Richard Leacock and Frederick Wiseman. The film is an anatomy of contemporary Cape Verde’s rapidly expanding tourism industry and the work done to sustain it: the recruitment of locals for canned musical performances; the building of hotels and swimming pools; the sand trade that has supplied the country with concrete ever since its own beaches thinned out. Homem and Pinho move hypnotically and patiently between the space of the archipelago’s resort-hotels and the daily lives of the marginalized communities on which they depend, with a perceptive eye for the country’s economic imbalances and a rare attentiveness to the rhythms of manual labor.