The following is a guest post from Jeremy Xido, the director ofDeath Metal Angola, which screens at DOC NYC on November 16.
A few years ago, I was traveling through Angola researching a film about a railway when I stopped at the only cafe in Huambo, the country’s bombed-out second city, that served a decent cup of coffee. A young man with tiny dreadlocks in a blue button-down Oxford shirt waved me over. I sat with him for a while and chatted. We talked about what I was doing there and I asked him about himself. He said he was a musician. “Oh really?” I said. “What do you play?” he looked me in the eye and said, “Death metal.” Stunned, I asked him if he would play for me. He got very excited, said he’d find an amplifier somewhere and told me to meet him later that night at “the orphanage,” and slipped me the address. I assumed it was some sort of club. But when I arrived in the middle of the night at what would turn out to be an abandoned milk factory in the middle of nowhere, it was clear that this was no club. There he was, outside the building, with an electric guitar, surrounded by 55 orphaned boys who called this place home. Using electricity siphoned from a neighbor, the young man – Wilker Flores – proceeded to play one of the hardest and harshest impromptu gigs imaginable, lit by nothing more than the headlights of a van. It was magical and terrifying, and marked the beginning of my long and profound relationship with Flores and his girlfriend, Sonia Ferreira, who runs the Okutiuka orphanage and is one of the most remarkable people I have ever met.
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