São Tomé and Príncipe / An unfinished film / 2009 to 2014
Wê“eyes”
What if you could step inside a painting and meet the person who lives there?
A documentary about artists became an anthology of imagined lives. Six local writers, real paintings, fictional characters and filmed stories grew into a world that was never fully completed.
Not a finished feature. A glimpse of what the anthology could be.
The public excerpt brings together material from Elsa Figueira and Me & My Friend The Slingshot. These scenes show the central experiment: a painted character becoming a written character and then a person moving through a real place.
The earlier project was listed with an intended feature runtime. That listing should not be mistaken for a completed release.
02 / The idea
First, look at the art. Then enter the frame.
01 / From the film archive02 / From the field
From Tomé to Wê
The project began in 2009 as Tomé, a documentary following artist Alex-Keller Fonseca and his ambition to exhibit his work. But the paintings kept asking for another kind of film.
What happened to a character before the moment painted on canvas? What happened next? Could documentary, fiction and an audience's imagination coexist without reducing the island to a single point of view?
Instead of filming only the people who made the paintings, we began imagining the lives of the people inside them.
01
Painting
Meet the artists and their work
02
Character
Imagine a life outside the frame
03
Writing
Develop it with local storytellers
04
Film
Make the world visible and audible
03 / Collective authorship
Six writers. Many more pairs of eyes.
In July 2013, Kris Haamer and painter Dio Lima convened a writing workshop in São Tomé. Six young writers explored paintings by local artists, met their makers and imagined the lives that could begin at the edges of the canvas.
This was not a foreign director assigning fictional stories to a place. The writers helped decide what the stories could be.
01Akaisa Borges
02Marlucy Bandeira
03Gilberto Ceita
04Luisa Santos
05Wilme Dias
06Edneyse Coelho
04 / Four story strands
One island. Four ways of seeing.
01 / 04
Me & My Friend The Slingshot
After a painting by Alex-Keller Fonseca
A boy goes into the rainforest with a slingshot. The story finds a small human drama inside the island's natural landscape.
Filmed excerpts survive
02 / 04
Love For Day
Painting-led fiction
A girl falls for the wrong boy when she mistakes the author of the love letters she has been receiving.
Written; filming status unconfirmed
03 / 04
Elsa Figueira
After a painting by Catita Dias
A young woman confronts violence in her relationship. This strand developed into a separate film and public campaign.
The documentary strand follows artists and the realities behind their work, with elements of magical realism.
Documentary work in progress
05 / An open question
What would it mean to enter these paintings today?
The film ran out of resources before the anthology could be completed. But its surviving footage, paintings, scripts and collaborators invite a new question: could this archive become an interactive experience rather than a conventional finished feature?
An installation might let visitors encounter the people and places behind an artwork, then cross into the fictional stories it inspired. New technology would be a means of opening the archive, not a substitute for its human authors.
This is a possible direction for future exploration, not a project already in production.
Kris Haamer, Wannes Debusschere, Leonardo Umbelina and a wider local and international crew
Current status
Partially produced. The planned anthology remains unfinished.
Trace the work
These contemporary and later records explain the project's evolution. Early plans, promotional descriptions and intended running times are not evidence of a finished feature.
