The first few minutes of "Death Metal Angola" don’t feel like the introduction to a documentary. They’re something more akin to the opening sequence of a horror film, writes Andy Krump in Paste Magazine.
The film, released last month, is the work of Jeremy Xido, left, a New York-based filmmaker, actor and artist who grew on in the Chandler Park Drive-Drexel neighborhood of Detroit's east side and Livernois and Six Mile on the west side. He attended The Roeper School in Oakland County. Xido tells Huffington Post he grew up in a black neighborhood and didn't know he was white until he was about 13.
"'Death Metal Angola' starts as a brooding national crisis doc and ends as a concert film, continues Krump. "The transition is remarkably seamless, and by the time Xido’s narrative draws to a close, you will have been moved well past the grotesqueries shared in its introduction. Music is a force for unity—forceful music, perhaps even more so."
"Death Metal Angola" does more than paint a portrait of hardship for its viewers, or lecture us on regional devastation that isn’t glamorous enough to make the evening news. Its primary concern is the power of art to bring people together, and to give them a filter for their emotions, their struggles, their misfortunes. Death metal seems the genre that’s least likely to uplift listeners; it’s angry, aggressive, an archetype that could literally be described as sound and fury—and that’s exactly the point.
Why death metal? Why Africa? Xido gives us context and background in controlled doses, fixating on a primary through line about the efforts of two residents in the city of Huambo—Wilker Flores and Sonia Ferreira—to kickstart a rock concert in their area, for locals as well as residents of nearby burgs like Benguela and Luanda (Angola’s capital).
Elsewhere:
Hollywood Reporter: "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."
Indie Wire: An "absorbing, beautifully shot documentary."
Huffington Post: Death Metal Angola is a beautiful film, one that is bound to become a cult classic."
"Death Metal Angola" trailer:
