When everything seems to collapse, which is the feeling I often have these months, home is the last rampart. Despite the differences, one is tragic the other is often comic, both directors describe the house as if it were the last thing on earth. It is important to remind that both films are conceived as a tribute to filmmakers’ parents. This dynamic work with the reality, that doesn’t want to transcend it but offers another angle to deal with memory, is the mirror or rather the diaphragm existing in between the two films. If Akerman had no other choice than filming the real house of her mother and show the resilience of a place to time, Richard Billingham’s meticulous research on details creates the framework that makes his film something in between fiction and documentary. Ray & Liz and No Home Movie are both films that plunge themselves into the past and find in the house the “madeleine” to make it comes alive. Anyway, my double bill for 2018 gravitates around the concept of the home. But watching film at my place, alone, knowing that my parents were somewhere else-near or far-must have had an impact on the things I saw. Maybe there is something working there, something rooted in my childhood-not that I didn’t have a house, on the contrary. In a crowded theatre I watched for the first time a restored print of the film, an experience that led me by the hand to the corner piece of the telluric puzzle that is modern Portuguese cinema.ĭon’t ask me why, but movies that deal with the “home” have a special appeal on me. This past November, Porto/Post/Doc put together a retrospective of Reis and Cordeiro and I was lucky enough to be in attendance. If you search on YouTube, you can find VHS copies of Trás-os-Montes (1976), but that’s a poor approximation of the duo’s work. It tells the tale of a deserted land and the last man who walks it with the weight of death on his shoulders: Who’s going to bury him? This film of the earth has its roots in the work of António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, as do many films by active Portuguese filmmakers like João Pedro Rodrigues, Leonor Teles or Marta Mateus. Over the course of six months, I saw a “wintry telluric animation,” a “make love not war telluric statement,” and a couple of “deeply telluric works,” but the best of the telluric class of 2018 has to be Anteu by João Vladimiro. If you had to define the Portuguese year in film, the word to use would be “telluric,” which means “of or relating to the earth.” The adjective came up sporadically in news articles about earthquakes, but often in reviews, articles, and blurbs relating to recent Portuguese films.
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