Unal is a village of rice producers whose inhabitants played a crucial role in Guinea-Bissau’s liberation struggle against Portuguese colonialism. They were the first to engage in the armed uprising, mobilizing their ancestral spirits, the Irãs - the natural land-owners to whom they pay reverence – into the guerilla. Still today, every gesture of the rice cycle – from plowing to harvesting – is haunted by memories of the war. A trauma that is also inscribed in their present- day rituals, bodies, landscapes, and techno music. In the war’s aftermath, a group of soldiers got possessed by a messianic vision, “The Shadow”, that gave them the power to foresee the future and heal their communities with bush plants through talismanic writings. FIRE IN THE MUD takes a deeply immersive approach to a complex melting pot of religious forms and political turmoil within a diverse community claiming their future in contemporary Guinea-Bissau.