An Interview with Pedro Pinho

Portuguese writer/director Pedro Pinho’s extraordinary drama, I Only Rest in the Storm (2025), set in Guinea-Bissau, is hypnotising throughout its 217-minutes running time.

The film introduces Sérgio (Sérgio Coragem), a Portuguese environmental engineer, as he drives to Guinea-Bissau to work on a project for an NGO. He initially struggles to find the rhythm of the city but then he meets Diara (Cleo Diára) at a market one afternoon. She asks him to hold her bags as she flees a man chasing her. Through Diara, he meets her queer bestie, Gui (Jonathan Guilherme), whom Sérgio kisses in a club one night. He spends his nights with these new friends and comes to adapt to the local life and culture. 

As Sérgio goes about his work – he is encouraged to hand in an impact assessment report early – he meets with various folks working on a connecting road that is being built as well as various residents whose lives will be enhanced or disrupted by the project. (This is conveyed through several documentary-like scenes shot with non-professional actors.) Sérgio shows his dignity and integrity dealing with various individuals and situations, but he also wonders if he will end up like his predecessor who mysteriously disappeared. 

The road being developed is a symbol for colonialism, and Sérgio, a white man, could very well be its poster child. Yet with no backstory, Sérgio acts as a blank slate here, codeswitching with each encounter, and trying to understand the people he meets as well as himself. (Sérgio does admit at one point he, “Has no idea what it is to be me.”) He engages in multiple conversations about race and class, and debates about capitalism and White saviourism with questions raised about who do you save.

In one of the most telling exchanges, Sérgio is confronted by a sex worker who asks him what he cares about – the working conditions of sex workers? The wellbeing of women in this country? Human trafficking? Minimum wage? Or clean water for everyone? She then tells him he only cares about himself and his own comfort. It’s a powerful moment.

Sérgio is looking for connection and belonging, and he experiences that when he has an explicit threesome with Diara and her friend Jota, who sodomises him in another symbolic moment that depicts intimate physical contact and connection while also expressing Sérgio’s foreignness and lack of belonging. Other sequences featuring Sérgio meeting with locals to discuss their lives and experiences – which contrast sharply to his own – further emphasise his status as an outsider. 

Pinho lets his leisurely but utterly absorbing film raise questions about corruption, exploitation, and globalisation as Sérgio tries to assimilate. The filmmaker spoke with Senses of Cinema about I Only Rest in the Storm following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival where Cleo Diára won the Best Performance Prize in the Un Certain Regard section. 

– G.M.K

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I Only Rest in the Storm

This film must have been an ambitious undertaking given its size and scope and details. Can you explain how you came to make I Only Rest in the Storm? 

I started to think about this project immediately after the release of my film, The Nothing Factory, in 2017. I was impressed with the impact of my previous film in Cannes, with critics, and the reviews. I thought it was a difficult film, and somewhat experimental in the use of words and discussions of political and philosophical thought as cinematic material. I was surprised by that, and I wanted to experiment a bit further and connect it more with a dramatic narrative. I wanted to further interlink these discussions of the polyphony of the character and the moments of thoughts and reflection with a story that was haunting me for 10-15 years. 

My first documentary, Bab Sebta, was shot in Mauritania, and I went back to West Africa after making that film because I was in love with the city and the landscape. I had many friends there and I wanted to be with them, and in that place, and think of myself “from the outside.” This gave me a surprising perspective on a way of living that I had considered as “normal.” One day, I was traveling with a friend, and hitchhiking, and she said she would like to visit Bissau, because her mother left there before the independence. I never considered Bissau. The country received bad media in Portugal because of the drug dealing. But I went there, and I was totally amazed by the people, the history and the strong connection to the liberation struggle that is still very present. I started to realise very important aspects of my own history there. Portugal had almost 50 years of fascist regime that ended in 1974. It was nonviolent – the Carnation Revolution – and it was profoundly racist. However, there was a very violent struggle, and many people died in this liberation struggle in many territories; it was especially hard in Guinea-Bissau. The young officials in the “colonial war” (the liberation struggle) saw that no political victory was possible, so they came home, and they organised the defeat of the fascist regime. So, the fighters of Guinea-Bissau offered us this liberation. Without them, we would probably be in a different situation. 

This shift of perspective really struck me. Guinea-Bissau has 50 cultures and languages, so colonialism never built a proper state there. All the traditions and cultures and languages are alive and present, so it was interesting to see that. I connected with some Portuguese working for NGOs. We couldn’t understand what this community of expats were doing there. They themselves weren’t able to understand the entire implications of their presence. I was curious about that. I thought I would make a documentary about this and continue the reflection I started in Bab Sebta, about immigrants trying to enter Europe. 

I was already working on a documentary on tourism in Cape Verde, so I decided to make a trilogy on the relationship between Europe and the South – migration, tourism, and cooperation. When I started to look at the logistics to do this, a companion of mine got a job as an environmental engineer in an NGO in the north of Guinea-Bissau. He had a house, and car, and we started to research it for a documentary. We went to an event in a faraway village in the north organised by UNICEF and we saw the scene represented in I Only Rest in the Storm where there is an event to inspect the new latrines financed by NGOs in this village community. That moment was so strong and humiliating and violent and totally unpredictable we couldn’t even film. We were smashed by the fact that we were there with white people entering the houses and toilets of old women in the village and trying to embarrass them. Only much later, I understood it was a program called “The Walk of Shame,” which is designed to implement new practices in rural communities to create new habits of sanitation. This strategy, thought up by some “illuminated” Western mind, thinks if we go to these places and shame these people, they will change their habits and practices. This is a degree of arrogance that shows a vision of the world that I could not deal with. So that documentary stopped. This idea kept germinating in my mind for 10 years and then it came as a fiction in I Only Rest in the Storm. I came back to the village to ask them to reenact that day, and they remembered that trauma and humiliation very well. The film was borne from that.

The film’s title, which comes from a song, is all about contradiction. Sérgio is conflicted throughout. This is film about his identity crisis; he does not know what it means to be him, and he feels a lack of belonging as he may be exploiting the people he wants to help. Can you talk about his conflict? 

Sérgio’s character allows us to enter a space between acceptance and refusal, between identification and repulsion. This is an important skeleton for the film, which needs us to empathise and identify with the problems being depicted. We as Europeans, and white and Western – and even as Black people cultured in the West – have this feeling that our everyday practices are a serious problem in the world. What is happening with climate change, but also with the history of privilege and exploitation and colonialism. We have to deal with these dilemmas. Sérgio tries to impersonate those dilemmas.

I Only Rest in the Storm

There is also talk about colonialism with Sérgio being accused of “coming in all tender and affectionate to heal the wounds you [White people] caused.” But there are some very disturbing scenes from Sérgio’s colleagues refusing to give water to locals but also failing to stop for an injured cyclist on the road as they fear he is going to scam them. How did you decide on the examples to express the White superiority?

All these sequences and scenes that are in the film are stories that I saw or heard. They were real stories. There were many more. They are stories of violence that struck us – how can it be possible that the very circumstances of him being there generates this kind of atrocity and barbaric position? The story of the water is very present. A friend in Mauritania who worked in a construction site was scandalised. He had to hide giving water to the local workers otherwise he will be fired. It’s a degree of insanity. Even if we are directly privileged by the economic mechanisms in those relationships, we are not aware of those things.

It was eye-opening! Watching the film, I asked myself: would I stop and help the fallen cyclist, or give the men water? It also prompts the idea that just because you want to help someone, it doesn’t mean they want your help. Can you talk about your critique of capitalism, which is raised most prominently in a discussion Diara has with Sérgio about progress and blood money, where she expresses this same idea?

Even worse than that, this help might be continuing the same situation that causes need for help. That’s the problematic issue. The relationship that caused the difficulties that you think you are going to solve, were created by this power imbalance. Diara is saying, “Stop helping us! Your help is killing us!” This came from these encounters and discussions that I had over the years.

Sérgio can be seen as a symbol of White saviourism and colonialism, but to me he is a blank slate – we know nothing about him. Can you talk about how you conceived of his character? He has good intentions but goes about things in the wrong way. He experiences trouble from the get-go, and suffers humiliation, shame, sickness, and is even sodomised (perhaps willingly) at one point. Are you mocking him? I was rooting for him the whole time. 

I don’t feel I am mocking him, unless you consider that I mock myself. Sérgio is coming from myself. He has his feet on the same ground I do. His condition proceeds him. As the French say, malgré soi. He fits into a condition that is already there and he cannot alter it. It’s a history, a heritage. The good intentions don’t help much. The sex worker says, “The thing that disgusts me the most is a good man.” Sérgio had a layer of morality and good intentions that are really problematic. It doesn’t depend on that. It depends on dealing with a situation and conditions and the power relationship you are transporting with yourself. Sometimes it is funny. Sérgio is more a listener than an active character. He has to go through all these perspectives, and experience dilemmas and problems. He is blocked in his agency and blocked by his contradictions that he faces. He is more than a coward; he is paralysed by being aware of his condition.

Sérgio has several moments of intimacy in the film, and the sex scenes are really powerful.  Can you talk about including these scenes? 

I wanted a main theme of the film to be the relation between desire and violence. In all the investigations I made that in all these expat communities, this subject of desire was very present. The fact that people – mainly men, but also women – from a certain point of the hierarchy of desire arrive there and they are catapulted to the top of the hierarchy of desire. If you are from a rural village in the north of Portugal, and work as a blacksmith or a construction worker, you are in the most basic level of hierarchy of desire in Portugal, but in Guinea-Bissau, you are at the top of the hierarchy. Beautiful young women come to see you and speak to you. This process works as an engine in the continuation of this relationship, more than money and the attraction of adventure. It is this possibility of having other bodies and connecting with them. This is a basic throughline in the film. I wanted Sérgio to impersonate this and be in the whirlwind of this relationship between power and desire, which crosses all of us in life. Any desire and love relationship involves power and some degree of economics. 

I was pleasantly surprised by that queer content in the film and how you contrasted traditional African dance and rituals with gay scenes in a club. Can you talk about “queering” the film?

When I was trying to write the film with a group of wonderful people who were connected with the [inspiration for] Sérgio, I realised that this was a story about identity, tradition, and heritage. Of course, the patriarchy is a huge part of that. It is a story of man, and violence promoted by men. In 2015, this discussion was very alive in Portugal. We felt there was a new generation coming that was passing all concepts of gender, sexuality, and fluidity that was very revolutionary. I wanted to have it in this film as a possibility of separation and show how something new was happening and this would alter things in the past. When I was in Bissau, I met Marsalina, a secondary character in the film. Through her, I met this queer community in Bissau, which is strong because the country has a very progressive constitution and law. They have the most liberal LGBTQ+ rights. I was amazed by the energy of the city, but also these very young people occupying spaces in the city. I was interested in that. I read a New York Times article about this community and Big Mama Fountain and the people in the film. It was very powerful and revolutionary because they are in a territory of struggle, and it linked with the tradition of liberation struggle that was very alive in Guinea-Bissau. I thought it would be some kind of movement. When I was working with this community, I was struck by the fact that the main weapon for their liberation struggle was fighting violence with tenderness. It opened my heart and soul to what was happening there. I had to include that in the film.

The film is very much giving voice to the people in Guinea-Bissau with documentary-like scenes where African characters express quite plainly their lives and concerns with other scenes such as the NGO debuting a latrine. What did you want to call attention to and how did you conceive of doing that? The scene of Sérgio with the sex worker raises different points than his encounter with Olga, a villager who lives freely.

These two scenes are made in very different ways. I always try to cast by not only looking at cinematic qualities of the actors but looking for the subjectivity and agency of these people. I value what comes into the shot and what is brought by [accident] but also by the improvisation of the actors. All the dialogues are improvised even if they are written. I have a detailed written script, but I don’t show the script to the actors. I try to make them get there, or get somewhere else. Most of the time, the improvised scenes are more productive, beautiful, and complex that what I could write. 

I Only Rest in the Storm

I chose the sex worker actress because she used to be a sex worker. She is a Senegalese who was born in France, and she became a thinker and theorist about feminism, bodies, and sexual positivism. She wrote books and was interviewed by French television. I was amazed by her thoughts and words. She constructed her thought and her discourse in a European environment. Olga, the villager, is exactly the opposite. I described the situation to her, and this dialogue she speaks came from her. This region is the ground of the Feloups [also Floups]. It is a culture that resists invasions – Portuguese, European, and before that Arabic, Malian, and Ghanian – for centuries and centuries. It is a culture based on resistance. The village in the middle of a mangrove. It is impossible to get there. This sense of community organising and resistance is very present, so this was the most beautiful thing I could film. Here it is really difficult, but you have to pay to drink water. There is a line that is not in the film, that you even pay to piss. [Laughs]. This is crazy!

There are also encounters that involve traditional African customs and rituals, some of which are explained to Sérgio, but not all. Can you discuss incorporating these moments? How much of the film should be European and how much African?

The film constructs itself from a European [perspective], there is no doubt on that. But like I was saying, when I spent more time in the ground of the Feloups, which is the culture that I know best in Guinea-Bissau, I was amazed by the cosmovision of this culture. Not only the political side but also the spiritual side as well. This relationship between monarchism, which is a Western construct, or politicism, and the presence of transcendent entities that are not really gods is very powerful. It was very disturbing, but at the same time very liberating. There is a sense of total connection between human beings and other beings. Human life doesn’t depend only on human agency. It can be liberating or very oppressive. It proposes something that South American Amazon thinkers and indigenous thinkers pressure us to consider – the historical moment that we are living now on Earth. We cannot sustain cultures with only human needs, necessities, and agencies. We need to consider other beings as important and as central as us. These [indigenous] cultures have done that forever. In many aspects, they achieve a philosophical equilibrium that we have lost. Many of these rituals are related to this. The Bush Monsters in the film, they do this Kumpó. It’s the forest that comes alive and speaks to you. [Penho demonstrates this by making noises with his mouth] and they have a human translator who tells you what they are saying. When we were finished shooting, we packed up the camera and the Kumpó spoke to you and said, “Don’t go away, because there is a surprise for you.” The surprise was when it got dark, they made a fire and the Kumpó started to dance on the fire. This is the connection with the forest and subjectivities that are not human. 

The film uses animals as symbols, especially in a discussion Sérgio has about saving a goat. Which one do you save? The Black one or the white one? The oldest or the youngest? There are also animals throughout the film from a sleeping dog to cows on a beach. What can you say about the film’s animals and symbolism? 

I think that comes from having a presence of other subjectivities other than human. The presence of the animals is there because we are not alone in the planet. All these contradictions and fighting somehow regards them as well, and we tend to exclude them in our calculations. 

There is a 5 hour and 20-minute version of the film that I am trying to premiere in more exclusive occasions. In that version, this presence of perspectivism as a cosmovision like the American perspectivism – and the possibility of having various ways of looking at the world and looking at other beings as humans and be seen as nonhumans – is very present. I could not have that much in this version. But the animals in the Kumpó remain in this exploration and they live with us in this same planet and are constrained by our choices.

Which goat would you save, by the way?

[Laughs] I don’t know! I can’t answer that! 

Lastly, in one of the film’s many telling conversations, Sérgio is encouraged to take a stand. While he has some integrity, he suffers this paralysis you mentioned. What do you want audience to take away from your film? 

It is difficult to do something, and you have to think very carefully about what you are doing and the implications of what you are doing. I want people to see Sérgio in them and connect and identify with their own place in the world and think maybe I would be like him and do the same things he does. This is the most important goal. What the fuck are we doing? And what are the consequences of being alive and being in the place where I am?