Tabu begins in the jungle, then moves to a woman in present-day Lisbon. It’s then revealed that the story is about an elderly white woman who lives with a black maid. And just when we’re certain that the strained relationship is the bottom of this movie, we enter a plantation in colonial Mozambique. Shot in black and white, the film manages to blur almost every imaginable line: between the mythical and the actual, the real and the surreal, comedy and drama, the present and the past, nature and civilization, madness and sanity, human and animal, colonial and postcolonial. (CHARLES MUDEDE)