Pedro Pinho’s sophomore feature is boundary-crossing in all senses. An international, polylingual co-production between his home country, France, Brazil, and Romania, “I Only Rest in the Storm” is set in a chimerical blend of West Africa’s Guinea-Bissau and the surrounding French-speaking regions, its almost uncontainable three-and-a-half-hour runtime spanning the various sprawling landscapes. Its philosophy also seems to be that torpedoing taboos — the greatest boundary of all — is the best way to tackle its themes of racism, colonialism, and queerness.
The Portuguese director’s latest is unlikely to resemble what most viewers would expect from a film about NGOs, which mostly cast them in a positive, gloriously pure light. Few other efforts have dared to venture into the murkier side of the industry, with Joachim Lafosse’s “The White Knights” (adapting the events of the 2007 Zoé’s Ark controversy) and the documentary “Poverty, Inc.” a couple of rare exceptions. But they do not push quite as far as “I Only Rest in the Storm”, which finds corruption around absolutely every single corner.
Pinho cut his teeth as a director on the acclaimed 2008 documentary “Bab Septa” which he made together with Federico Lobo, threading together first-hand accounts across four North African cities from those about to set off on dangerous immigration routes to Europe. He continued in a similar humanitarian vein with his first full-length fiction feature “The Nothing Factory”, an equally expansive, avant-garde meta docudrama about workers’ rights, set in an elevator factory.
The writer-director stays true to the same filmmaking instincts in “I Only Rest in the Storm”, offering lingering shots of the desert and exhaustive interviews with uncredited nonprofessional actors which deliberately muddy the border between documentary and fiction. This time round, though, Pinho’s unabashedly audacious epic is carried by a goofy, nomadic outsider whose past we know nothing about — slightly reminiscent of Josh O’Connor’s dusty vagabond in “La Chimera”, but much less likeable. An NGO worker who is well-meaning but white, unignorably privileged and ignorant of it, he is ill-fated to prove himself over and over again to be a liability.
On paper, the plotline of Pinho’s latest reads either like straight-up satire, or like quasi-B movie material: a tetchy environmental engineer Sérgio (Sérgio Coragem) arrives as a consultant on an infrastructural project, enlisted to write up an “impact assessment report” and gather data on the social and environmental impact of building a mega new road. Instead, he spends most of his time partying, hooking up with sex workers in front of his (very blatantly racist) expat colleagues, or romantically pursuing his only two local friends, Diára (Cleo Diára) and Gui (standout newcomer Jonathan Guilherme). The pair both — understandably — don’t quite trust him. (Note that the characters are named after their actors, Pinho collapsing the realms of fiction and reality ever more messily together.) “I Only Rest in the Storm” is neither satire nor B-movie though. Too earnest to be ironic and too thoughtful to be trashy, it plays out more gently and ruminatively than its list of plot points would make it sound, while still managing to be wildly entertaining.
A white savior might seem a bad choice of protagonist, but Sérgio merely acts as a vehicle for other narratives which are more interesting and of greater significance. If ever an actor has doubled up as a lead and a fringe figure at the same time, Coragem accomplishes that here. Sérgio is a means to weave together the stories of the cool queer metropolitan crowd orbiting Diára and Gui and the more down-to-earth inhabitants and workers in the outlying villages served by his NGO.
Ultimately, the film hammers home that this klutzy, tactless new man in town is first and foremost a voyeur — which is where most of the taboo shattering comes in. By the meetings he contrives between them, it becomes plainly obvious that Sérgio is down bad for Diára (and, honestly, anyone else vaguely attractive he meets), but the knotty power dynamics involved with him as a foreign aid worker propel the film fully into grey-area territory. Added to that, his “problematic” predecessor has disappeared in mysterious circumstances, his coworkers suspecting that he ran off with a Bissau-Guinean woman, while Sérgio guesses at something much more sinister. Not to give too much away, but in one full-frontal scene, Pinho cleverly calls our own voyeurism — as, well, viewers — into question.
While it all gets deliciously murky, Pinho’s disarmingly candid script and prismatic examination of his topic indicate that the filmmaker is no flippant provocateur. Moments of genuine warmth are woven together effortlessly with deft skit-like displays of razor-sharp humor, outlining the painful hypocrisies of NGO workers (this range is captured in Ivo Lopes Araújo’s chameleonic cinematography, which skillfully adapts its colors throughout the film’s multitude of acts). Its canny use of Sérgio’s awkwardness and incompetence to comedic effect also feels like if Alex Ross Perry brought his sense of humor to bear on socio-conscious drama.
“I Only Rest in the Storm” gradually peels back the layers of an industry which — like all others — has its ugly underbelly. The film loses a little steam by its end, when it begins to feel like Pinho is testing not just boundaries but our patience too. But the film is admirable in the way it doesn’t try to settle on any easy answer (which is why the fact that it struggles to come to a definitive close can be forgiven). Overall, the big swings this wending odyssey takes in merging genres and weighty ideas do pay off — it’s a gargantuan, continent-crossing feat.
Grade: A-
“I Only Rest in the Storm” premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers.
