This mixture of fictional storytelling and quasi-documentary method, written by Pedro Pinho and directed by Filipa Reis and João Miller Guerra, stars Miguel Moreira as a young man also named Miguel, a laid-back Rastafarian musician whose mother left him, shortly after he was born, with his grandmother in Lisbon. After bumping into a stranger on the street who says that he resembles a man she once knew in Cape Verde, the former Portuguese colony some four hundred miles off the African coast, Miguel decides to go there and search for the father he never met—a man his grandmother says was something of a scoundrel who spent time in prison and was deported to his native land afterward; the only other information she can provide is that Miguel has an aunt in the capital of Praia who might put him on the right track.
Leaving his girlfriend behind, Miguel uses a recent windfall to buy a one-way plane ticket and, after a flight in which he fantasizes about a line of young women dancing in the aisle and flirting with him, reaches Cape Verde and hitches a ride to his aunt’s neighborhood. There he discovers that she died a year earlier, but his hospitable relatives tell him that she had family in Tarrafal who might be able to help him. Unfortunately, he does not realize that there are two towns with that name and goes to the wrong one. In the end, though, it is the journey rather than the destination that matters.
The film turns into an engaging picaresque in which Miguel encounters a succession of colorful characters—most notably Maria Antonia, an elderly goat farmer who invites him to work for her in return for meals and a place to stay—while he walks or rides from place to place and observing the country’s landscape, shot nicely but not in overblown travelogue style by Vasco Viana.
Most of the cast are non-professionals, but generally, they avoid seeming self-conscious on screen, and the directors also make room for some musical numbers in which Moreira can show off alongside the locals. The film does meander in the final stages, when Miguel’s appetite for grogue, the country’s potent liquor made from sugarcane, invites the filmmakers to indulge in a few surrealistic touches. But eventually, it ends with a message from Lisbon that compels him to return there, a bit wiser, more mature and more responsible. Dijon África is technically a tad messy and unfocused, but it comes off as a charmingly understated journey of self-discovery. Recommended.