Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 6

A soulful, bottom-up portrait of a country finding its postcolonial identity, Mortu nega follows the determined Diminga (Bia Gomes) as she journeys to the front lines in search of her soldier husband during the final days of Guinea-Bissau’s war for liberation from Portugal. After freedom is won, Diminga and her compatriots must maintain a steely resolve in the face of a host of daily challenges: accessing health care, navigating the state bureaucracy, and confronting a devastating drought. Directed with fierce commitment by Flora Gomes, a student of anticolonial leader Amílcar Cabral’s, Mortu nega offers a clarion call for strength and healing through unity.

Mortu nega was restored in 2025 by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and the Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata in collaboration with Flora Gomes. This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers, and UNESCO, in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna, to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema. Funding was provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Special thanks to Arsenal–Institut für Film und Videokunst.

Writer-director Luiz Sérgio Person’s debut feature is a masterly vision of existential unrest in Saõ Paulo amid the mass industrialization of the 1960s. This bracingly modernist, puzzlelike film follows Carlos (Walmor Chagas), a middle-class auto-industry employee, as he questions his relationships with romantic partners past and present (played by Darlene Glória, Ana Esmeralda, and Eva Wilma), as well as his participation in the transforming economy. A kind of city symphony filled with striking, dynamic images of a rapidly changing urban landscape, São Paulo, Incorporated is a cry of rebellion against a suffocating push to modernize, and one of the landmark works of Brazilian cinema.

São Paulo, Incorporated was restored in 2025 by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and the Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata, Cinemateca Brasileira, and JLS Facilidades Sonoras–Estúdio JLS, in association with Cinemateca Brasileira, Lauper Films Ltda, and the family of Luiz Sérgio Person. Funding was provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Special thanks to the Italian Institute of Culture in São Paulo.

Equal parts symbolist psychodrama and shamanic ghost story, The Woman with the Knife delivers a surreal investigation of fractured identity. The sole feature by trailblazing Ivorian filmmaker Timité Bassori stars the writer-director himself as a bourgeois intellectual whose life is thrown into turmoil after he experiences a disturbing vision of a mysterious, knife-wielding woman—the beginning of a crisis that forces him to confront his deep-seated sexual repression and social alienation. Capturing the streetscapes of 1960s Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, in New Wave–cool black and white, and set to a dreamy mix of American jazz and West African pop, this touchstone work of African cinema is a daring and complex journey into the postcolonial unconscious.

The Woman with the Knife was restored in 2019 by the Cineteca di Bologna and The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, at L'Immagine Ritrovata. This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers, and UNESCO, in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna, to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema. Funding was provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

Forged in rhythm, ritual, and mysticism, this masterwork by Iranian New Wave legend Bahram Beyzaie is a transfixing allegory shot through with the fear of a mysterious, encroaching force. When a boat carrying a severely wounded man (Khosrow Shojazadeh) drifts onto the shore of a small coastal village, most of the community regards him with suspicion. But the quietly confident Rana (Parvaneh Massoumi), whose husband disappeared a year ago at sea, finds herself drawn to the outsider. The Stranger and the Fog, which was banned in Iran following the 1979 revolution, is a film of overwhelming power, possessing both the epic dimensions of myth and the hallucinatory atmosphere of a dream.

The Stranger and the Fog was restored in 2023 by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and the Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata in collaboration with Bahram Beyzaie. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Special thanks to Ehsan Khoshbakht and Mojdeh Shamsaie.