Fresh
What we have here is a rather sweet story of the plan to hold Angola's first national rock concert in its bombed-out, rubble-strewn, second-largest city, Huambo.
Anita Gates, New York Times
Overview
Following nearly 40 years of unrelenting war, peace and reconstruction are slowly arriving to Angola. Huambo, Angola’s second largest city, finds 55 children in the Okutiuka orphanage under the care of Sonia Ferreira. Her boyfriend, Wilker Flores, is a death metal guitarist who uses sounds and rhythms of this hardcore music as a path to healing. Or, as Sonia says, “to clear out the debris from all these years of war.” The feature documentary follows Wilker and Sonia’s attempts to stage Angola’s first-ever national rock concert, bringing together members from different strands of the Angolan hardcore scene from different provinces, as it all unfolds in fits and starts, against the bombed out and mined backdrop of the formerly stately Huambo.
Director and cast
Critics on Rotten Tomatoes
Top critics, in their words
92%
Tomatometer
Rotten
Director Jeremy Xido pays attention to the music only peripherally, without providing cultural context to supplement the history, and the country's demotic kuduro genre gets only a couple of passing references.
Martin Tsai, Los Angeles Times
Fresh
The genre's aggressive qualities aren't just a coping mechanism, but also a means of recontextualizing personal and national traumas.
Michael Nordine, Village Voice
Fresh
An upbeat chronicle of very hard rock in a very hard place, Death Metal Angola is one of the livelier and more enticingly exotic additions to the ever-burgeoning music-documentary sub-genre.
Neil Young, Hollywood Reporter
Fresh
I've seen more than enough documentaries about extreme metal that mythologize violent, antisocial behavior; this one shows people using harsh, aggressive music to build a positive community.
Leor Galil, Chicago Reader
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