While the first harsh, brutally descriptive shots of Nação Valente do the best to set you in a certain place and historical context, rest assured that nothing in this film is what it seems. Although there is a fair share of time specifications (a date on screen, different types of telephones), Conceição's setting for Nação Valente is curiously timeless.
As in previous efforts, Conceição manages to deliver highly effective storytelling without hardly any dialogue, like an invisible observer, whilst building up tension and using ambiguity to convey his points. It's a work with a haunting, fable-like quality, a narrative that might as easily be about seven medieval samurais were it not for the intrusion of modern weapons and record players. Its floating sense of loose time, its gentle pans across the African landscape as Zé tries to remember his mother, all feel a world apart from modernity. That ancient heart is perhaps the whole purpose of the film, which at its final quarter holds a mirror to our face as we are left wondering in shame if we have indeed evolved at all since the crusades. While Conceição's previous films began to pencil in his worldview, Nação Valente's perspective is drawn in ink. It doesn't feel like an experiment, or playful in the autobiographical manner of Serpentarius; it is a vision that blooms as an allegory. A film of despair and optimism, cruelty and salvation - and its own clandestine sense of humor - Nação Valente contains philosophical and spiritual dimensions, and a unified visual poetry, that qualify it as Conceição's first masterpiece. It's a highly ambitious work which succeeds on its purposes as both a work of history, unstinting in its concrete depiction of political hatred and fear, and a portrait of the metaphysics of tyranny.
