Three generations of Angolan women anchor Nayola, an animated drama that carries a quarter-century of civil war through grandmother, daughter and granddaughter rather than through battlefields.
What is Nayola about?
Lelena is the grandmother, Nayola the daughter, Yara the granddaughter — three women whose lives fold into and out of each other across twenty-five years of civil war in Angola. The film moves between past and present rather than in a straight line, tracing how one conflict marks three different generations in three different ways. At its center, Nayola sets out to find her missing husband at the height of the fighting, a search that pulls the film's timelines together and gives the whole family history a single, urgent thread to follow.
About the cast
The voice cast is led by Elisângela Rita, Vitória Soares and Feliciana Délcia Guia as the three central women, with Marinela Furtado, José Adelino Barceló de Carvalho, Raúl Rosário, Edmar Jorge Pires Domingos and Lírio Faria filling out the surrounding roles. Their performances carry the emotional weight across the film's shifting timelines, holding the three generations distinct even as the animation moves fluidly between them.
Context & significance
Directed by José Miguel Ribeiro, Nayola is a 2023 animated feature made across Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Portugal, blending drama and fantasy elements into a story rooted in Angola's twenty-five-year civil war. At 90 minutes, it uses animation rather than live action to move between eras and generations, a choice that lets memory, myth and history sit side by side without needing a literal framing device. The film's international, multi-country production reflects how widely the story of Angola's civil war has traveled beyond its own borders.
Watching Nayola on Ktime
Nayola is available to stream on K-Time with a free account login, and the catalogue is free to browse before you commit to watching. The film has Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, so it can be followed in Farsi either way, inside an interface built around the Farsi-speaking diaspora.