a Vemeer-like view of a Portuguese woman with a white head scarf on looking out a windowalr

Trás-os-Montes

Directed by António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro.
With Ilda Almeida, Rosalía Comba, Luis Ferreira.
Portugal, 1976, DCP, color and b&w, 111 min.
Portuguese with English subtitles.
DCP source: Cinemateca Portuguesa - Museu do Cinema

Reis and Cordeiro’s undisputable masterpiece exploded the meaning and possibilities of ethnographic cinema with its lyrical exploration of the still-resonant myths and legends embodied in the people and landscapes of Portugal’s remote Trás-os-Montes region. Evoking a kind of geologically Bergsonian time, with past and present layered upon one another, Trás-os-Montes interweaves evocative recreations of the ancient worlds and encounters with atavistic peasantry, following the pilgrim’s path traced by Reis and Cordeiro as they led their skeletal crew from village to village in search of the poetic essence of the Portuguese language and imagination. Reis and Cordeiro painstakingly researched and shot Trás-os-Montes over the course of one year, becoming intimate with every person included in their ambitious film, carefully selecting the different voices, faces and gestures that would together provide an extraordinary composite, associative and mythological response to the question of how to define a “national cinema.”

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