A documentary film entitled “Cesaria Evora, la diva aux pieds nus”, directed by Ana Sofia Fonseca, traces the life of Cape Verdean singer Cesaria Evora. Known at first for her melancholy, struggle with alcoholism and depression, she eventually became a world star. The film explores the different stages of her life, from her heyday in 2003 with the album “Voz d’Amor” to her death in December 2011.
World-famous at 50
The film begins in 2003, during the recording of “Voz d’Amor”, an album that went on to win a Grammy Award in the USA. Cesaria Evora was at the height of her fame, which had miraculously and belatedly fallen into her lap.
“My albums are selling everywhere”, she says in one of the many archive documents, most of them unpublished and private, that form the backdrop to this feature-length film punctuated by her songs. The next sequence takes us back in time to August 1991. The woman who called herself “Cize” has just turned 50. The reputation of this vibrant and poignant interpreter of the morna, the Cape Verdean blues, has only just begun to spread beyond this volcanic, wind-battered archipelago lost in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
“Mar Azul”, the propulsion
“She has a unique voice, rooted in bare territory, which comes from her guts”, asserts journalist Bouziane Daoudi, who came to interview her in the ramshackle two-room apartment where she still lives, just two months before the release of “Mar Azul”, the album that was to propel her forward.
Twelve years separate these two sequences, during which Cesaria Evora went from being a marginal figure, singing from time to time at Mindelo’s Porto Grand Hotel to earn enough to buy a glass of whisky, to international star. “Mar Azul”, “Petit Pays”, “Sodade”… Her songs and her personality touched millions of people.
Cesaria Evora, the “Human Complexity
Ana Sofia Fonseca goes back and forth in time and space, placing her career in its historical and social context, in an attempt to understand it. From Los Angeles to a wasteland in Sao Vicente, via Havana, the director sets out to discover a Cesaria Evora who is not just the singer who appears barefoot on the world’s great stages.
“I find it much more interesting to know someone’s story without necessarily following the traditional biography, but with a richer narrative structure,” she explains. In order not to weigh down the narrative, another choice was not to have the people giving their testimonies appear on screen. They deal with the singer’s demons, her alcoholism, her painful youth, her phases of depression and weariness, but also her generosity.
A free woman
“Cesaria’s strength lies in her human complexity,” says the filmmaker. “The film shows that she remained true to herself right up to the end, without celebrity affecting her authenticity.
Not forgetting her attachment to her “Little Country”. “I’m from Mindelo, it’s my land, my roots”, she says in a film set against the backdrop of the Sao Vicente landscape. But above all, Cesaria wanted to be a free woman. “The first record I made in France was called ‘La diva aux pieds nus’ (The Barefoot Diva). It was a good title, because I’ve never liked shoes,” she says at the start of the film.