Trás-os-Montes

Director: António Reis, Margarida Cordeiro

1976 / 111min / DCP

“A film of long shadows and smoke in twilight, Trás-os-Montes is an intensive labor of recollection, an epic of a land and a way of life on the edge of oblivion. In 1974, while traveling through villages in this isolated region in the Northeast of Portugal, Reis and Cordeiro recruited a cast of inhabitants old and young to materialize their histories, legends, dreams, and nightmares for the camera. The rebelliousness of the peasants, their everyday existence far from the laws of church and state, their closeness to ancient things, to trees and rocks—these encounters informed the dialectical approach of the film, where fiction and reality, past and future swell in an immediate present. In voiceover, Reis and Cordeiro adapt passages from Kafka and the Chinese poet Po Chü-i, translated to the guttural subdialect of the Northeast. As an act of solidarity with a people facing extinction, Trás-os-Montes echoes through time.” —Series curators Edward McCarry and Graham Carter (The Theater of the Matters)

Digitization by Cinemateca Portuguesa - Museu do Cinema

Introduction by The Theater of the Matters guest curators, Graham Carter and Edward McCarry on Sunday, February 23rd