Cannes 2025 – I Only Rest In The Storm ★★★★

Released: TBC (Cannes 2025)

Director: Pedro Pinho

Starring: Sergio Coragem, Jonathan Guilherme, Cleo Diára

On the surface “I Only Rest in the Storm” could have been designed by the sneering youths who make memes, mocking long movies made in places they personally don’t care about. On the other hand, for the true cineaste, such a film is a challenge accepted. This Portuguese movie, about an environmental engineer collating an environmental impact report for a road proposed to cross the small African national of Guinea-Bissau, premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and enjoys a runtime of precisely three hours and thirty-one minutes. It needs every second of that runtime to enable us to consider the impact the engineer’s privilege is having on the environment around him, including himself. That makes “I Only Rest in the Storm” an unusually smart gift for those who know how to receive it.

Sergio (Sérgio Coragem) arrives in Guinea-Bissau by car. On arrival he discovers more pressure than expected, since his predecessor suddenly died in unclear circumstances leaving everybody in the lurch. Without the environmental impact report, the road will not get financing, so timelines are tight. Soon after in a nightclub he makes two friends: Guilherme (Jonathan Guilherme), an ambiguously-gendered mixed-race Brazilian, and Diára (Cleo Diára), a well-known and well-connected but small-time local businesswoman. Diára wears a nose ring like a hairclip across its bridge, an innovative piece of jewellery also useful to ensure we are not confused by her endless number of elaborate wigs. Sergio finds himself oddly drawn to them both, and when he is in the city he tries to spend time with them.

But his work investigating the various issues that would be impacted by the new road means Sergio must spend long periods travelling. He has a fixer/interpreter named Bojan who cheerfully explains various aspects of the complex local cultures to him. He spoils a party thrown by an expat factory worker in honour of the daughter he hasn’t seen in three years. He is brought to a brothel, where his companion for the evening (who has an unusual face tattoo) gets angry at his discomfort and asks why he so suddenly cares about the rights of sex workers. He steps on an oyster shell in a muddy swamp and badly cuts his foot. He is in a village when several blonde UNICEF workers show up to admire the toilets they’ve installed to try to eliminate open defecation. And all the while he is under pressure, especially from the wealthy Portuguese businessman who is leading the road’s financing and has many vested interests in the impact report turning out the way he wants it to.

So Sergio goes dancing with Guilherme, who is considered white by the locals, which Guilherme finds shocking, very funny and incorrect. At the same time Sergio asks Guilherme not to judge him by race without at least getting to know him as an individual. He also tries to ingratiate himself to Diára by moping around after her, giving her rides around town whenever she needs a favour. Diára enjoys the kindnesses but only up to a point. When she looks at Sergio she sees someone who can escape whenever he wants and with enough money for a fancy life anywhere he pleases. The word ‘colonizer’ doesn’t get used much, but it is always there under everything. And try as she might, Diára cannot get Sergio to understand that her focus on money is because it’s the only thing that matters. When you don’t have enough, as most people in Guinea-Bissau don’t have enough, you don’t have the freedom to have high morals. Though as a well-educated white man with a good job and a great passport, Sergio himself has more than enough.

Director Pedro Pinho, who is also one of the ten credited screenwriters, is clearly closely considering how our identities impact our own personal environments. Whether that’s the body we were born into or the bodies we like our body to have sex with, it’s tough to escape how you were made, though a lot of people die trying. They also die from a lack of sanitation and clean water, and a road that would speed up the trip to hospital would also mean fewer women dying in childbirth. So there are reasons to build the road, along with endangered species of animals and subsistence farmers who would lose their land. So there are reasons not to. What price for progress? What is the impact?

Coragem plays a very demanding part which requires a level of physical boldness that is unusual in this kind of movie, and is so lowkey good he doesn’t seem to be acting. Diára, who has mostly worked in Portuguese TV, does a wonderful job of showing the kind of woman used to asserting herself in the face of other people’s lack of imagination. And Guilherme, for whom this is his movie debut, brings a sense of good cheer and adventure to remind everyone – starting with himself – that there are more than two sides to every coin. The threesome towards the end, the participants of which should not be spoiled, does an incredible job of bringing that metaphor into sweaty reality. “I Only Rest in the Storm” is absolutely not for everyone, but for those ready to consider its message it is a thought-provoking and intelligent slow-burn.