Αlso in this ethno-fiction film, the couple Reis and Cordeiro returned to the remote Trás-os-Montes area, using the landscape as a backdrop for the portrait of an intergenerational family. The rough place and the cyclical time of rural life are, in a way, personified in the figure of Cordeiro's own mother, cast as a matriarchal grandmother, whose relationship with her children and grandchildren, but also with the windswept landscapes, is tinged with the melancholy of her imminent, final departure. The film’s minimal and Rilke-inspired dialogue reveals Reis and Cordeiro’s interest in a deeper, non-verbal mode of communication, not only between generations but also between the land and those passing through it.
António Reis & Margarida Martins Cordeiro:
António Reis (1927) began as a member of the Experimental Section of the Porto Film Club and worked as an assistant director on Manoel de Oliveira's The Rite of Spring (1962). After the documentary Jaime,he co-directed three more feature films with his partner Margarida Martins Cordeiro. In 1977, he became schoolmaster at the Film School in the National Conservatory and died in Lisbon in 1991. His life and film partner, Margarida Martins Cordeiro (1938) was a psychiatrist by profession.