I Only Rest in the Storm

Overall, the big swings this wending odyssey takes in merging genres and weighty ideas do pay off — it’s a gargantuan, continent-crossing feat.

Pinho’s interest in neo-colonial issues is tackled with a lucid gaze and appropriate room for local perspectives.

That I Only Rest in the Storm should overflow with ideas is not in itself an indictment; it’s that the film should gradually shed so many of its mysteries and ambiguities.

Whatever the post-colonial lessons are, I Only Rest in the Storm’s characters articulate them too evidently, as if preemptively justifying the making of a film in or about “Africa” on the condition that the white man’s presence is relentlessly denounced.