Another Day of Life
Using revered Polish writer Ryszard Kapuściński’s front-line reporting as its basis, Damian Nenow and Raúl De La Fuente’s animated odyssey plunges us into the chaos of the bloody Angolan Civil War in 1975.
Warsaw, 1975. At the Polish Press Agency, brilliant journalist Ryszard Kapuściński convinces his boss to send him to Angola where a bloody civil war has broken out on the eve of the country’s independence. He embarks on a seemingly suicidal road trip into the heart of the civil war. There, he witnesses once again the dirty reality of war and discovers a sense of helplessness previously unknown to him. Angola will change him forever: it was a reporter that left Poland, but it was a writer that returned.
War was the standard of living for Ryszard Kapuściński. Poland during World War II was his home as a child; hunger, cold, death, noise and terror were the sole certainties for the young Ryszard. Later, he wrote: "We who went through the war know how difficult it is to convey the truth about it to those for whom that experience is, happily, unfamiliar. We know how language fails us, how often we feel helpless, how the experience is, finally, incommunicable.” Exactly this – translating war experiences into prose – would be his life's work.
Africa, Latin America, the Middle East – virtually no part of the world was safe for Kapuściński’s sharp pen. Despite the scorn that, due to his pseudo-journalistic style (a blurry line between fact and fiction), was often poured upon him, he is still known as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Gabriel García Márquez even crowned him ‘the true master of journalism’. Sometimes literature is war: Kapuściński swung his pen like a machete.
Read an interview with the creators of this film