The Hero Or O Heroes: Film Analysis

There are many conceptual definitions of what it means to be a hero. In one instance, a firefighter can be a hero for saving dozens of individuals from a burning building. In other instances, a hero can be a student sharing notes to another student who was out sick. In The Hero or O Heroi, the hero is Vitorio, a war veteran who lost his leg towards the end of the Angolan Civil War. Directed by Zeze Gamboa, the film follows the lives of Vitorio, Barbara, a prostitute who lost her son when the war started, and Manu, a boy looking for his father. This Third Cinema film looks at “the struggle of ‘cultural decolonization’ and the ‘recuperation of a national culture’” (Buchsbaum, 159). It is an allegory of a nation fighting to recreate itself. This paper will discuss the prominent theme of cultural decolonization and analyze how the character’s personal history and their nation’s national history shape …show more content…
Although the strife of war is not one that everyone can truly relate to, the inability to resume life after a hardship is noteworthy. The film implicitly and explicitly showcases the need of restoration through the characters’ troubles and through the obvious devastation from the war. The idea of loss is seen through Vitorio’s leg as well as the loss of family members of Barbara, Manu, and the rest of Angola’s citizens, which relates to the loss of a nation and its culture from colonization and the war. Family is also a prominent theme such that it provides a framework that Angola needed to understand to help them return back to its original state prior to the war. Negritude, the issue of solidarity amongst black Africans, and the moment all the veterans came together in the film, are precursors for the importance of unity in general. Thus, these themes throughout the movie are important because it works together to combat the politics of a country that destroyed the politics of the original