Rising Sun Blues
(Rua dos Anjos)

Maria Roxo was born in Lourenço Marques (today’s Maputo), Mozambique. From a young age, she enjoyed playing outside with the children of her father’s employees. Later, she got into medical school. On account of political acts of defiance, spurred by the classes taught by influential protest musician Zeca Afonso (protest musician), she was sent to the colonial battlefront as punishment, to serve as a nurse. There, she encountered morphine and through it, a way to escape the violence of her reality. After the Carnation Revolution (April 25th 1974) she arrived in Lisbon. In order to keep up with the addiction she inherited from war, she became a sex worker for more than 20 years. Her years of training in classical ballet made her into an adept stripper. In strip clubs, she escorted and received the stories of all the men that passed through. As a street worker, she was reminded of the horrors of war. She never felt like she belonged in Portugal. She dreamt of one day returning to Mozambique. Maria always knew her life would make a movie. She began filming it in 2016, when she met Renata Ferraz.

Renata Ferraz was born in São Paulo, Brazil. In the middle of the megalopolis’ chaos she majored in scenic arts and worked as an actress for 20 years. She was a part of theatre research groups and also performed with nationally and internationally renowned theatre directors. The violence suffered both in her home town and her profession, as well as her passion for moving images led her to escape to London and, later, to Lisbon. She began with creations in video art and afterwards, fictional shorts. She considers the processes of making a film as a space for experimentation and investigation. In Lisbon, she also attained a master’s degree in Multimedia – Audiovisual and a doctorate in Performative Arts and Moving Images. From theatre, she inherited a taste for collective creation. She decided to make a film based on a shared filmmaking process with someone who did not belong to the world of cinema or other arts. She knew this project would be possible when she met Maria Roxo.