A mercenary sits in silence on a chair placed in an abandoned palace in Lisbon, as if posing for a portrait. Facing the camera, he begins narrating and performing his own history, constructing a record which slowly reveals in its turns of phrase and mismatched events a series of doubts and contradictions. The camera watches, relentlessly. Paulo narrates his involvement as a hired killer for special military forces during the Portuguese colonial war, the part he played in the GAL – Antiterrorist Liberation Group, a death squad illegally established by the Spanish government to annihilate high officials of ETA, and his work as a mercenary for the CIA in El Salvador. Rather than being interested in affirming the veracity of the historical record or in proving an official narrative, No Man’s Land dwells in the present moment of witnessing, the space inhabited by the performance of a memory. Refusing to linger on a static moral duality, throughout the film accuser and accused are frequently asked to change positions – at a certain point, after describing a series of crimes he committed, responding to a question by the director Paulo replies with one of his own 'How much is worth the life of a man? A man like me or men like them?' As the film’s own processes of making are slowly revealed, No Man’s Land creates a set or a stage where information or document are peripheral to the question of how one plays out and affirms as history his own personal truth.
Paulo offers sublime portrayals of the cruelties and paradoxes of power and of the revolutions that brought it down, only to erect new bureaucracies, new cruelties and paradoxes. His work as a mercenary is in the fringe of these two worlds.

This film selection is part of the film series Elsewhere, within which looks at the last decade's explorations and renewals of ethnographic filmmaking. The series includes film screenings in our cinema, films presented through our streaming platform and commissioned film essays. The project is supported by the Norwegian Film Institute.

Watch Extinction by Salomé Lamas on out Home Cinema.

Get tickets to screenings of Eldorado XXI (wed 06.09.23/ tues 12.09.23)

Read the essay by Maria Moseng about Salomé Lamas’ films (IN NORWEGIAN ONLY).

Salomé Lamas (b. 1987) is a filmmaker from Portugal. Her films challenge the lines between documentary and fiction and has a special interest in the relationship between storytelling, memories and history. Lamas explores the traumatic, repressed, unrepresented, and places or people who have become invisible in history, whether it's relating to colonial violence or landscapes that are exploited for capital gain, describing her method as modified ethnography or parafiction.

Her first feature film No Man’s Land [Terra de Ninguem] (2012) screened at several prestigious festivals such as the Berlin International Film Festival, and her shorts have been exhibited at art and film institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, TATE modern in London and the Biennal of Moving Images in Geneva.