‘I Only Rest In The Storm’ review: Pedro Pinho visits neo-colonialism in Guinea-Bissau

Dir: Pedro Pinho. Portugal/France/Brazil/Romania. 2025. 211mins

A Portuguese environmental engineer tries to navigate the tricky waters of being a white man in West Africa in I Only Rest in the Storm. Director Pedro Pinho, whose three-hour unemployment musical The Nothing Factory won a host of festival awards in 2017, has now made a 200-plus-minute feature set in Guinea-Bissau that feels impressively novelistic — if never quite epic. Better at exploring questions of neo-colonialism than sexual power dynamics, this sweaty specialised item, shot mostly on 35mm and premiering in Cannes Un Certain Regard, should nonetheless appeal to festivals and high-end arthouses.

Pinho’s interest in neo-colonial issues is tackled with a lucid gaze 

We first meet bearded engineer Sérgio (Sérgio Coragem) in the desert on what turns out to be the tail end of his car journey all the way from Portugal to Guinea-Bissau. He’s headed there to complete an environmental impact report about a planned road through rice fields, left unfinished by Sérgio’s predecessor who has mysteriously vanished. 

Sérgio quickly falls in with two people who also happen to be best friends: Diára (Cleo Diára), a fierce local woman, and Gui (Jonathan Guilherme), a free-spirited, queer Brazilian man. Together, they run a bar in the nominally Portuguese-speaking country. To explain the difference between Sérgio and himself, Gui suggests: “He colonised, I was colonised.” Pinho takes that idea literally as well, as Sérgio has the hots for Gui and initiates a kiss at a party – even if Sergio isn’t quite sure how his whiteness makes Gui, who identifies as Black, feel. But whether that kiss is the beginning of something more becomes the object of a bet between Diára and Gui about their newfound white pal, who is unaware he’s become a pawn in their game.  

I Only Rest In The Storm joins a cohort of Portuguese films – including Miguel Gomes’s Tabu, Ivo Ferreira’s Letters From War and João Nuno Pinto’s Mosquito  – that attempt to untangle the country’s complex relationship with its colonial history. Whereas those were all period films (even if Gomes took a postmodern approach to period), Pinho’s film is set in the present. This means it is focused more on neo-colonialism, with Sérgio a white Portuguese man in a former Portuguese colony who holds a lot of power: his report can either start or derail construction on important public works. 

As played by Coragem, Sérgio isn’t — or rather, doesn’t try to be — too aware of his relative importance, treating his duties as just a job and often presenting himself as a milquetoast character. But the fact that his (white) predecessor disappeared in mysterious circumstances is never far from Sérgio’s mind. He clearly wonders about whether he will end up like his now-vanished colleague and what, if anything, might have been the latter’s faux pas in a country in which Sérgio doesn’t know any of the local power players — or does he?  

Pinho’s interest in neo-colonial issues is tackled with a lucid gaze and appropriate room for local perspectives. Yes, this is a film with a white protagonist in Africa but Diára and Gui’s points-of-view are a necessary part of the screenplay (credited to the director and eight others). Ideas and themes arise mainly from conversations and situations that feel natural rather than preachy or academic, with a late, fiery conversation with Diára in a car being especially powerful.  

Indeed, editing, credited to Pinho and three others, does a remarkable job of creating an involving human story packed with socio-political and historical undercurrents, at least for the film’s first three hours (during the last 30-odd minutes, the protagonist and film seem somewhat lost). 

One thing that complicates matters on the ground — or, rather, in bed — is Sérgio’s love life. If a white person has sex with a non-white person in a saga about neo-colonialism, it becomes nearly impossible not to read something metaphorical into the act. But Pinho’s sex scenes, some of them rather explicit, play out on a more complex, less predictable – and at times less comprehensible – level than the general socio-political situation and its obvious imbalances, so drawing any direct parallels between the film’s sexual and thematic planes is complicated. Sérgio’s adventurous sex life might make the story more individual and contemporary, but it also renders the film’s ultimate message less obvious.