The writings of French philosopher Ernest Renan decisively contributed to our understanding of nationalism worldwide, and that forgetting is an essential part of any process of nation-formation. This is because the crystallization of a nation is hardly separable from violence, either in the form of revolution or anti-colonialism. What makes a nation, Renan famously argued, is the willingness to forget and move forward in forging national allegiances. Being together, in this regard, comes down to the capacity of a particular group with specific and demarcated national boundaries to forget the process through which they came about. Only through this can a territorially bound nation coexist peacefully.

Renan wrote this almost 150 years ago, and since then, so much has changed in the theory and practice of nationalism. However, it does not require a stretch of the imagination to see in Dulce Fernandes’ film a critique of such a view. It is not lightly, I suppose, that Fernandes called her new film Contos de Esquecimento (Tales of Oblivion). She is no stranger to working with painful subjects, particularly those that involve memory, as in the case of the traumatic memories of the Cubans that fought in Angola, explored in Cartas de Angola (2011). Tales of Oblivion also focuses on memory or the kinds of memory that a particular nation, the Portuguese, in this instance, decided to forget, or not to honor, such as the Transatlantic Slave Trade— specifically how the trade connected faraway places on the Atlantic coasts of Africa and the Americas, and also involved continental Portugal. So, this is the part of the history that the Portuguese nation would rather forget.

Fernandes exposes something deeper and more unsettling—how certain histories have been suppressed or silenced, and how they manifest in the myths that traverse Portuguese literature from Luiz de Camões to Fernando Pessoa and beyond. This literature has the sea as its major trope, celebrating the adventure and courage of the Portuguese character and how it was instrumental to the “discovery” of the New World. However, what is missing here is how this process has contributed to one of the most dramatic and consequential longue durée events in history, the Atlantic Slave Trade.

As such, silence and distortion are implicit in the sustained recreations of Portuguese mythology. Dulce’s film is not just about slavery or the slave trade, but also about the present day—how silence and the repression of the past are conducive to racism, or the negation of the extent to which race is central to the formation of Portugal.

What instigates such a reflective film is an excavation (to make way for a parking lot) in Lagos, a city in the Algarve region of southern Portugal. The excavations revealed that the location of the parking lot sat upon a 15th-century landfill, containing human skeletal remains. Those remains were subjected to tests, and it was determined that they belonged to Africans who might have been enslaved by Portugal and brought to the Lagos area. Since the burials of those remains can be dated to the time between 1420 and 1480, it is logical to assert that Portugal was the destination of the slave trade before the option to Brazil had been opened up.

One would expect such a discovery to prompt a reckoning in Portugal, in which the past would be seriously addressed and an alternative history perhaps explored. In the Soviet Union, Cambodia, or Guiné-Bissau, such discoveries prompted cataclysmic change. The fact that this was not the case in Lagos only shows the extent to which those parts of Portuguese history are still deeply repressed. Fernandes takes time to show the handling of the remains (including thousands of human bones) through oral statements of those involved in excavating, exhuming, and cataloguing them. The remains were removed, the parking lot construction continued, and a commemorative plaque was added to signal the site of such an important archeological discovery.

Fernandes’s motivation lies elsewhere, and as the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that she is less interested in the discursive space opened up by such a discovery than in the historical ramifications of such archeological findings. Fernandes painstakingly reveals the names of many of the Africans enslaved in Portugal, and how they were transported in the caravels and galleons invested in such sea voyages. This is a piece of corrective history because Portugal has taken so much pride in its long maritime history—an Odyssey reproduced on public buildings and in metro stations, without reference to the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Her interest, then, is in subtly showing the presence of black people in historical and present-day Portugal. A careful listener would detect hints of African accents in the background voices in the long sequences that show Praça do Comércio (Commerce Square) in Lisbon; or that Denise Viana, a Portuguese black woman, narrates the long sequences of the sea; or even the suggestion that there is a connection between slavery in continental Portugal and the implementation of the harsh labor laws in the late 19th century. This is how history can be claimed and how history can be retold otherwise.

Fernandes could have found a more realistic and documentary way to deal with the topic— involving more experts and talking heads, for instance. However, she has chosen to present the work poetically and evocatively. The film comprises long sequences depicting records and historical references gleaned from various archival sources.

Fernandes’s poetic film disrupts the mythopoetic narrative of the Portuguese nation. The problem here is not only of historical proportions, but also in how forgetting the presence of marginalized groups in the past obviates their marginalization in the present. In this disjuncture lies also the root of racism in contemporary Portugal.