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Ruth was the code name given to a promising footballer by the men who took him from Mozambique to Portugal, a story now turned into a film depicting what happened to Eusebio in 1961.
That was year he “leaves Lourenço Marques, now Maputo, arrives in Lisbon and sees the colonial and dictatorial regime in Lisbon”, says António Pinhão Botelho, director of the film.
The premiere is scheduled for the beginning of next year, but a summary was presented at a press conference on Wednesday in the Mozambican capital, where filming ended last week.
In focus is the footballer, but also society and everything that happened in the year in which Eusebio, arriving at Benfica, was catapulted into the limelight. And the year the colonial war began.
“It’s basically a spy movie,” set in a picaresque world of “two societies”, one in Mozambique another in the “metropolis”, Botelho says.
Igor Regalla, a Guinean actor, plays Eusébio as an adult opposite the Mozambican actress Josefina Massango as his mother.
“Only a poet could explain how I feel, and what an honour it is to give life to a personality like this,” Regalla says. “It’s gratifying, and a huge responsibility,” is Massango’s response.
Eusebio’s own Mafalala neighbourhood and other places he used to frequent served as sets for filming in Maputo this month, in an experience that António Pinhão Botelho describes as breath-taking.
“You go there and tremble at the thought that Eusebio was here,” he said. He considers the film a difficult project, taking into account the central figure.
“Anything I do will fall short of the person himself. Even if it’s the best film in the world, it will at best reach only his heel, and only his right heel at that, because his left heel was better.”
The film received support from the Mozambique National Institute of Audiovisual and Cinema, the Maputo Municipal Council, Lisbon City Hall and Camões – Portuguese Cultural Centre in Maputo.
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