Cesária Évora (2022)
Genre: Documentary / Biography
Duration: 94 minuten
Alternative title: Cesária Évora - Diva op Blote Voeten
Country:
Portugal
Directed by: Ana Sofia Fonseca
Stars: Cesaria Evora
IMDb score:
7,4 (286)
Releasedate: 12 March 2022
This movie is not available on US streaming services.
Cesária Évora plot
She was called “the barefoot diva”, but world star Cesária Évora (1941-2011) was averse to diva behaviour. From this loving portrait emerges an image of a singer who, among other things by performing barefoot, never forgot her poor origins. A singer with a deeply melancholy voice, "which comes from her inner self, her life and her country", as someone in the film says. That country is the bone-dry Cape Verde, where Évora ended up in an orphanage as a ten-year-old child, because her mother was unable to raise or raise six children after her husband's death. She left after a few years and became a café singer. That raw life changed when she became a world star at the age of 50.
Reviews & comments
mrklm
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- 11659 messages
- 10059 votes
Césaria Évora was the odd one out musically. This Cape Verdean singer without formal training lived and worked in poverty and obscurity for a long time before she broke through at the age of fifty with the widely acclaimed album 'Mar Azul' (1991). Archive footage of performances by and conversations with this idiosyncratic singer is provided with additional commentary by manager and close friend José Da Silva, and by granddaughter Janaye. They make it clear who exactly was hiding behind this remarkable, always barefoot woman. Certainly invites you to (re)discover the music, but in the second half you hardly learn anything new and the conventional form may cause the attention to relax.
Translated from Dutch · View original
hvdriel
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- 397 messages
- 357 votes
Extremely thin documentary that keeps repeating itself. The cause is obvious: Cesária Évora can sing quite nicely, but has little or nothing to say. And probably the rights of her performances did not lie with the docu-makers... Well, then you don't have enough to fascinate.
Translated from Dutch · View original
De filosoof
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- 2490 messages
- 1702 votes
I am not familiar with world music and I also did not know Cesária Évora: when I watched this documentary I was pleasantly surprised by the music and her warm voice so that I was immediately open to hearing more about this genre in general and the art of Cesária Évora in particular, but unfortunately the documentary is actually only about her person and not about her art. We learn that she is old and ugly, so that record companies were not interested in her for a long time, that she comes from a very poor background and has always remained very simple (her only ambition in life is a plate of food and a roof over her head, but even that is almost unattainable because she gives everything she has to others) and that she tends towards depression (she is said to be manic-depressive). And that she is a strong woman, but that seems obligatory in these crazy times (a kind of sexism of low expectations): in any case, she loved young men and remained unmarried. All in all, the documentary is not very special, but as an introduction to this world-famous star that you have never heard of, it is inviting to look up her music.
Translated from Dutch · View original
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