“Chapa 100,” the 2025 Atlas Workshops Development Award winner, now a potential highlight at Locarno’s Africa-focused strand Open Doors, has been boarded by Italy-based sales agent Luminalia.
Written and directed by Mozambique’s Ique Langa, “Chapa 100” has also added as an associate producer Mo Harawe, whose “The Village Next to Paradise” screened in Cannes Festival’s 2024 Un Certain Regard to enthusiastic reviews, Variety hailing it as a “quietly powerful film.”
Also on board are Egyptian cinematographer Mostafa El Kashef, and a third production partner, Mozambique’s Better Films – signs of a building production in which talent and industry wants in.
Also penned by Langa, “Chapa 100” marks the filmmaker’s follow-up to feature debut “The Prophet” (“O Profeta”), which world premiered in main competition this year at the IFF Rotterdam and now forms part of Locarno’s Open Doors Screenings.
In advanced development, “Chapa 100” is lead produced by filmmaker Lara Sousa at Kulunga Filmes, based out of Mozambique capital Maputo, behind “Nós, Povo das Ilhas,” directed by Elson Santos and Sousa. Pedro Borges at Portugal’s Midas Filmes, a past Kulunga partner, co-produces.
Shot with an observational style, priming social realism and emotional insight, “Chapo 100” lifts off into a magical realist style which, along the lines of Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” says much about the collective mindset and heart of Maputo dwellers and the illusions of individual characters, “celebrating the resilience, tenderness, and humanity found in the city’s everyday rhythms,” Langa and Sousa said in a statement.
In it, Sitoé, an 80-year-old flower vendor meets Valentina, a vegetable seller in her seventies. A simple flower sparks a quiet romance. When a thief steals Valentina’s rented wig, Sitóe runs after him and is struck dead by a speeding chapa, a local minibus. His spirit becomes tied to the vehicle that killed him, however, and flowers begin to bloom within it.
“‘Chapa 100’ is my love letter to Maputo. I wanted to portray the city not simply through its streets, but through the people who give it its heartbeat. By bringing together professional actors and non-professional performers from the city itself, the film seeks to capture something truthful and deeply human,” Langa told Variety.
“Blending realism with magical poetry, ‘Chapa 100’ is ultimately a story about love, memory, and the invisible bonds that connect us and to the places we call home,” he adds.
Langa has completed a seven-week residency at MacDowell, where, he told Variety, he had the “opportunity to deepen the screenplay and refine the emotional core of the story.”
“Chapa 100” recently received the Cultiv’Art / Expertise France Development Grant, one of the largest international development grants ever awarded to a Mozambican feature film project. Together with the Atlas Workshop Development Prize, this marks an important step in the film’s international journey, noted Luminalia’s head of sales and festivals, Tommaso Priante.
In a drive into sub-Saharan African cinema, Luminalia is also representing “The Prophet” and “Atcha Atcha,” the new doc by award winning Senegalese director Mamadou Dia.
Dia’s debut, “Nafi’s Father,” won the award for best first feature at the 2019 Locarno Film Festival as well as the Golden Leopard in its Filmmakers of the Present section.
Screening out of competition at this year’s Locarno Festival, “Atcha, Atcha” follows students in their third and final year at the École des Sables, founded by legendary Senegalese dancer and choreographer Germaine Acogny and described by Dia as “the Ivy League of dance schools in sub-Saharan Africa.”
Dia and Harawe will deliver a masterclass at this year’s Open Doors.
Screening at Open Doors and a Mozambique-South Africa-Qatar, “The Prophet” begins with evangelical Pastor Hélder preaching in the village of Manjacaze. His inspiration and congregation dwindling, he turns to black magic to fire up his oratory and heal his parishioners, but his powers come at ever larger sacrifice, literally.
Pointedly framed, even in vertical box aspect, bringing sense and sensitivity to shots, “The Prophet” builds as a black and white film parable about overweening ambition, becoming as well “an expression of the community [Manjacaze] that inspired it,” Luque told Variety. “The Prophet” also marked out Luque as a director to track.
“Distributing African films, for us, means accepting a challenge that is not only operational but also theoretical and positional. Luminalia was founded precisely on this idea: to question our own ethnocentrism and bring a more conscious approach while working with non-Western titles,” Priante told Variety.
He added: ”We’re very happy to see that around 50% of this year’s line-up consists of African titles. This was our goal from the moment we launched the company last year, and it’s rewarding to see that established directors understand our approach, which seeks to question ethnocentrism and promote a form of distribution that involved a more theoretical and anthropological framework, not just a business model.”