In few cases has the decision to live according to an idea of cinema found such explicit expression as it has in the work of Basil da Cunha. More than 15 years ago, the Swiss director of Portuguese descent moved lock, stock and barrel to Reboleira, a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Lisbon marked by precarious housing conditions and home to a large Cape Verdean community and its descendants. He discovered that this was where he wanted to live and make his cinema. It was not enough for him to slip quietly into the community, camera on his shoulder, make a film and leave. Basil genuinely moved there, in a gesture that was personal, social, political and artistic, seeking to become part of the community and to make films from the inside out.
Basil’s cinema departs from some of the conventions typically found in Portuguese and European films portraying life and its problems on the urban periphery. On the one hand, it does not follow the aesthetic and artistic path of Pedro Costa. It does not seek frame-worthy shots or cultivate that extreme care with lighting and composition that allows an image to move easily from the screen to the museum, while relegating narrative in its classical sense to a secondary position. On the contrary, Basil likes telling stories, and his fast-paced narrative approach encourages the camera itself to remain dynamic.
Nor does he adopt an indulgent and overtly political stance, as if entrusted with the mission of showing the world that everyone living there is a decent citizen whom society has turned its back on. Basil films without that kind of agenda. He searches for something more genuine, constructing the stories that he and the group of residents he works with want to tell.
Those stories may be different from the ones we expect them to tell us. They are not necessarily fragments of social realism in the manner of the Dardenne brothers, nor an awakening to urban diversity and conflict in the vein of Kassovitz. They are works of fiction involving crime, passion, gang warfare, financial difficulties, family relationships and much more.
The success of Basil’s project also rests on acquiring his own means of production and establishing his own production company. From very early on, this allowed him to invent a production method specifically tailored to his cinema. In Basil’s view, it takes a whole neighbourhood to make a film. He takes this idea so literally that, according to the director himself, it would be difficult to find anyone in Reboleira who has not taken part in one of his films, either in front of or behind the camera.
The language of Basil da Cunha’s cinema has been developed systematically and consistently as a collective art form since 2011, when his first short film, Sunfish, premiered. Basil has become one of the most significant Portuguese filmmakers of the past decade, deservedly recognised both nationally and internationally.
O Jacaré is the fourth feature Basil has constructed in Reboleira and has been announced as the last one to be filmed there, not least because the neighbourhood is being demolished. It follows the musical Manga d’Terra (2023) and The End of the World (2019), perhaps his most acclaimed film. My personal favourite is the short film 2720, shot in a single take that reveals the neighbourhood’s labyrinthine architecture with particular agility.
One might naturally have expected the demolition and rehousing of the residents to play a central role in the film. Yet the process is merely visible in the background, as it inevitably must be. It presumably caused the director a few headaches, since many of the locations disappeared between the writing and the shoot.
The film is built upon the ruins of a neighbourhood where everything is about to collapse, yet no one talks about it, as if there were an alligator in the room.
Brought into the neighbourhood as an unwanted gift intended to please the leader of an established gang, a kind of local mafia, the alligator is the disruptive element that adds flavour to a relatively repetitive film. We may amuse ourselves by teasing out symbolic meanings for the animal: danger, untamed nature, exoticism, the outsider, the bulldozer that will destroy the neighbourhood, the director himself, good or evil. Above all, however, it serves as a source of amusement and distraction, prompting some inspired dialogue. We hear lines such as: ““He’s cute. He’s nice and calm. He’s friendly, bro.” or “The alligator has feelings.”
The alligator is an element of humour in a film in a constant state of turmoil. Beyond the dynamism of the camera, sustained through long takes, the film’s lengthy opening section reflects a society in convulsion. Everyone shouts. Everyone has a reason to be angry or outraged about something. This is survival within a difficult ecosystem. Following a robbery at a bingo hall, the police patrol the neighbourhood, watchful and active. Dealers and residents clash over the missing money. Some want to escape with it; others know that only when it turns up will the police leave the neighbourhood and everything return to normal. Aggression is the prevailing language. Some try to collect debts, while others refuse to pay them. There is more Scorsese and Tarantino here than Pedro Costa and the Dardenne brothers. Robert Altman appears only as a mirage in the film’s multi-plot structure.
Chandi emerges as a central figure. He is a fragile young man, divided between loyalties and betrayals. He is the one who changes sides but cannot find his place, who belongs with no one. A victim of others and of himself.
In a more explicitly political and social moment, one of the gang members asks him: “Are you a footballer? Are you a singer? No? Then the only way you’re going to make it in life is with us.” The lack of alternatives is encapsulated in the voice of a gangster, showing that neighbourhoods such as these, like the favelas of Brazil, are products of social exclusion that can only be addressed through broad policies of inclusion.
But this is the limit of Basil’s politics. As already explained, he is not the kind of director who carries an agenda on his shoulder. He is not there to lecture us.
So much so that this film almost raises the opposite question. There is a danger that O Jacaré may further stigmatise these neighbourhoods by presenting them as ghettos, rather than helping to construct a fresher sociological image of them. The risk exists, but it is part of the game.
As before, Basil made the film he wanted to make, not the one that would have met expectations. The film he wanted to make is a kind of multi-plot gangster thriller, with rival groups and police violence. Its richer human dimension remains between the lines. Those lines can be found in the dialogue, the secondary scenes, and the narrative and aesthetic details that are ultimately dispensable to the central strands of the action. The art lies between the lines. And it is precisely this art that distinguishes O Jacaré, for the better, from the mainstream of the Brazilian favela-film subgenre.
Otherwise, O Jacaré may be the most repetitive of Basil’s films, repetitive in the sense that it adds little more than an alligator to what came before. It also reinforces the need to bring a cycle to a close. The neighbourhood has been demolished and, in a sense, Basil da Cunha has almost exhausted his model. Ora di bai, as they say in Creole. Time to go. What remains is an entertaining and forceful legacy, along with tremendous curiosity about the next destination of this sui generis director who turned Reboleira into a Cinecittà.
O Jacaré
Switzerland / Portugal, 2026, 92 min
Written and directed by: Basil da Cunha
Cinematography: Patrick Tresch
Editing: Basil da Cunha, Kostas Makrinos, Noa Roquet and João Nunes
Original music: Henrique Silva
Sound: Igor Marlot and David Badalo
Cast: Alexandra Sena, Heidir Correia, Paulo César Lima Fonseca, Alexandre Fonseca, Nelson Carvalho, Pedro Diniz, Carlos Fonseca, Pedro Ferreira, Frederico Lopes, Verónica Lii and Maria Santos
Production: Thera Production and Continue Walking
Associate production: Akka Films
Co-production: RTS Radio Télévision Suisse
International sales: Low Light Films
Portuguese distributor: Nitrato Filmes
Languages: Cape Verdean Creole and Portuguese
World premiere: Locarno Film Festival 2026, International Competition
