‘All is Well’ (2011) perfectly illustrates one of the most notable characteristics of this cinema, which relates to the condition of being ‘between-places.’

This is arguably a trait that permeates all Black Cinema, or cinema produced by Black diasporas, at global level, as Manthia Diawara observed, in 1993, in the work ‘Black American Cinema’.

The film tells the story of two sisters living in Lisbon, whose hearts are still in Luanda, where their mother lives and where a civil war is taking place. The phrase ‘All is well’ is heard repeatedly in the frequent phone calls between Lisbon and Luanda.

The story of the film unfolds in the late 1980s, and the way that Alda and Maria inhabit Lisbon is also marked by their transit between the city, still operating under a fascist, conservative and racist mentality, and its peripheries, where Black Africans were ‘dumped’ like a waste product of an empire that, in truth, never really was one, and of a lost war – the Colonial War (1961–1974).