Shot in 2019 and set entirely in the Mozambican city of Inhambane, “Balane 3” has a kinetic rhythm that brings the city to vivid life on screen. Director Ico Costa, who has made other documentaries in Mozambique, has a roving camera that manages to tell a place’s story through its people while never identifying anyone by name or following them in the traditional cinéma vérité style. Costa and cinematographer Hugo Azevedo Aip place their cameras mostly at a distance, producing an outsider’s vision that commemorates the faces and conversations that make up a bustling city.
The film, named after the neighborhood where it was shot, captures life by observing how people talk to each other — on the street, in hair salons, while working together, in restaurants, at a birthday party. The filmmakers’ gaze sometimes stops to watch a specific event, like a dance or a discreet seduction. Sometimes it moves behind a motorcycle rider or beside someone walking at a beach. Whatever it does, the people it’s viewing become the protagonists of a riveting tale. Among the static shots, there are many that linger just long enough to tell a complete story through the interactions and movement of the people within the frame.
Then there are the conversations. Many conversations. These people talk about life, about love, and mostly about sex: what gets them going, whether masturbating weakens stamina, who they want to seduce. A singular scene unfolds outside a high school where many students are gathered in clusters. They are separated by gender, with the boys on one side, the girls on another. Both parties are occupied with looking at the other. There’s animated talk, sizing up of each other. The camera follows as one guy moves from the boys’ section to spark up a conversation on the other side. As all eyes from both camps converge on him and the girl he approaches, a love story between the two begins. One had the nerve to make a move, yet the other holds the key to reciprocation.
The audience never gets to know anyone by name, profession or any other identifier. Not one person in “Balane 3” appears in more than one scene. Yet their narratives never feel incomplete. The audience gets only a short glimpse of a life, and yet, the way Costa and editor Raul Domingues assemble them, it never feels like something has been left out. Cumulatively, the audience gets a sense of how it might feel to live in Inhambane. Perhaps more than anything, “Balane 3” suggests that voyeurs might make for excellent filmmakers, drawn to things that casual onlookers might deem banal. Everyone and everything shown here tells the audience a fable, albeit a real-life one.
However, this foreigner’s gaze might also be construed as colonialist. After all, the filmmaker is Portuguese and there’s a brutal history between his native country and Mozambique, a colony of Portugal until 1975, a country whose official language remains that of its former imperial overseers. That murky complication appears in scenes where Costa films Mozambican traditions. A long dance sequence, à la finale of “Beau Travail,” is innocuous enough, but a marriage negotiation between two families in conflict? Similar in length and narration to the aforementioned schoolyard scene, a long stretch of time is afforded to this sequence.
While Costa’s camera remains a distant bystander, in showing locals discussing virtue, dowry and other topics rooted in their traditions, it raises the question of whether Costa and his collaborators should be privy to something so private and removed from their own reality. It’s reminiscent of Claire Denis’ films set in Africa, another filmmaker accused in some corners of having a colonialist gaze. The answer in both cases is that the filmmakers never pretend that they are not foreigners, observing what holds their interest. Their gaze never claims ownership of what it’s capturing.
From public gatherings to intimate moments, public and private, “Balanae 3” is a tapestry of a city in motion. Its scenes may be unrelated scenes, and there are no connective narrative threads to follow and no protagonists to identify with, yet it’s a complete documentary of a city and its people.