Written and Directed by Carlos Conceição
Winner – Best European Film, Locarno Film Festival 2022
Winner – Youth Jury Award, Locarno Film Festival 2022
Official Selection – New Directors/New Films 2023
“Remarkable. Audacious. A horror-tinged nightmare that nods to the sprawling impact of colonialism across eras.”
– Guy Lodge, Variety
“A film of great ambition… An ever-shifting dreamscape, one that may correspond to the collective trauma of the colonial era itself.”
– Michael Sicinski, In Review Online
“Blazingly confident…a richly layered text which interweaves the plausible, the purely symbolic and the unambiguously supernatural.”
– Neil Young, Screen International
“Stunning, serpentine… A multi-stranded, microcosmic, brutally uncompromising investigation of colonialism.”
–Jessica Kiang, Sight & Sound
Kino Lorber is pleased to present Carlos Conceição’s ambitious and exquisitely crafted genre-fluid fantasia TOMMY GUNS.
TOMMY GUNS opens theatrically on April 12 at BAM in NY and April 21 at Laemmle Theaters in LA, followed by national expansion.
Angolan-Portuguese director Carlos Conceição’s audacious and enigmatic TOMMY GUNS invokes the ghosts of Angola’s colonial past while embracing the symbolic power of genre filmmaking. The story begins in 1974, just one year before the country’s independence from decades of Portuguese rule. Wealthy colonists are fleeing the country as Angolan revolutionaries gradually claim their land back. A tribal girl discovers love and danger when her path crosses that of a Portuguese soldier. Another group of soldiers, completely cut off from the outside world, blindly follow the brutal orders of their commander in the name of serving their country. But nothing stays fixed in this genre-shifting cinematic puzzle, which playfully swerves from art house drama to war film to zombie flick to escape thriller with exhilarating control. Winner of Best European Film and the Youth Jury Award at the Locarno Film Festival, TOMMY GUNS has elicited comparisons to the work of Claire Denis, Miguel Gomes, and even M. Night Shyamalan, and announces a bold and exciting new voice in Portuguese and Angolan filmmaking.
