IQUE LANGA: THE PROPHET (2026) - NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2026

A Christian pastor in the heart of Africa struggles with spiritual doubt

A slow mover who connects with the transcendental, Mozambican writer director Ique Langa sees Robert Bresson, Yasujirō Ozu, and Carl Dreyer as his cinematic ancestors. But The Prophet is an African film, imbued with raw African energy and in a mixture of local languages and the official ("colonial") language and lingua franca, Portuguese.

Impressionistically, Langa sketches in a picture of a spiritual struggle with bold strokes. His protagonist is a minister, Pastor Hélder (the solid, somewhat rotund Admiro De Laura Munguambe)i. The film was a nine-year journey for Langa with a non-professional cast in Manjacaze, a small town in southern Mozambique where he spent much of his childhood and where his father was born. The town, he has reported, has experienced a boom of pastors and churches. The film's theme, or one of them, the filmmaker said, is "Be careful with the doors you open."

Pastor Hélder is tempted to turn to witchcraft and sacrifice to energize his waning Christian faith, or perhaps the fading of his congregation among the local competition. The film is impressionistic, or expressionistic, and occasionally surreal. Helder's wife (Nora Matevel), with whom he communicates in Portuguese, while in church he prays to God in an African language, is pregnant, and will give birth pretty soon. However, she is still cooking the evening meal for him and herself, and enjoying it. She is fearful about giving birth and says so to him. But it is he who turns up toward the end of the film wet and weeping and repentant for a host of sins he can't bear to name to her, while she remains calm and reassuring, the strong one.

Helder approaches a dark sheep whose luminous eyes glow out at him. In the film's most memorable image, he approaches, twice, a large hut with a midget dressed in suit and bow tie sweeping the dirt in front with a whisk who seems to be the purveyor of witchcraft he seeks. An older man leads the pastor into the woods and says "Go alone, you will find what you want. But do not forget the maringuate plant."

Among his confessed failings Helder lists to his wife never learning how to swim. So at the height of his spiritual crisis he walks into the water and submerges himself, fully dressed, up to the neck. Does he swim? Or is he baptized? It is from this experience that he comes to his wife wet and weeping.

While The Prophet may be said to be "exploring the clash between postcolonial Christianity and traditional spirituality" (or traditional ritual), the details are never specifically worked out. The strength of the film is that it draws us into the pastor's intense, inchoate state of spiritual self-doubt in all its inarticulate suffering. His dabbling in witchcraft, if such it is, isn't specified but hinted at, and the reasons for it, like his sins, of which it may be one, cannot be spoken.

Other elements are strong in this vivid, intense film, whose use of black and white seems a good choice both for asserting the filmmaker's links with his idols Bresson, Ozu and Dreyer but also for intensifying its focus on moral and spiritual issues, whose imbalance is further expressed through changing aspect ratios.

There is no sense that Helder's congregation is fading or disloyal. Their singing at service is rousing and they stand up and speak testimonials to how the church has given them strength to go forward in their lives when they had doubt. There is an obsessive young man, perhaps hyperactive, with his father who he says has had an "accident" and incessantly seeks help, first at the doctor's office, then at Pastor Helder's home, finally right during the service at his church.

Finally at the end of the film and with the congregation gathered around him the pastor acquiesces and blesses the old man, hands-on, almost as if performing a healing ritual. Shortly after the father falls down dead and his son yells to the pastor, "You have killed my father." But tis is followed by a burial service for the man, with a beautiful, soaring vocal, and Helder and the bereaved son standing beside each other, apparently at peace. The film ends here, with the coda of a final gesture toward non-Christian beliefs in the attitude toward the dead and their understood progression from dead to spirit to ancestor. It's a strange ending, perhaps. But Langa follows his own rules and he has crafted an impressive and memorable film.

In his cast Langa used mostly non actors, including local talents such as Admiro De Laura Munguambe, Nora Matavel, and Alexandre Masnado Coana, who contribute their identity and experience to their performances, as do others who play members of the congregation. Langa's dp is Denilson Pombo and editor Sara Carneiro working on a minimalist vision with boxy ratio going through slight aspect changes, working together with the monochromatic images to direct, forceful effect throughout.

The Prophet/O profeta, 94 mins.,premiered at Rotterdam Jan. 29, 2026. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films (Apr. 8-19, 2026). Showtimes:
Walter Reade Theater
Thu, April 9 8:30 PM
Q&A with Ique Langa
MoMA Titus 2
Fri, April 10 6:00 PM
Q&A ith Ique Langa

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.