Saturday 15 March at 18:00

Trás-os-Montes is the first feature and most emblematic work of the couple Reis/Cordeiro, authors of a short but unique set of films which stand among the most original and demanding Portuguese cinema. Done as a portrait of a region – the remote and then radically impoverished northeastern Portuguese region of Trás-os-Montes, significantly emptied by emigration – the film does not look at it as a “sacrificed” province, but as the repository of an ancient, rich popular culture, poetically contrasting its cyclical time with the linear time of “progress”. Without a hint of falsification or mythification of its social reality, it addresses the “essential myth” of old (but present) Celtic culture. As Jean Rouch has once underlined in his high praise of the film: “This film, to me, is a revelation of a new cinematographic language. [...] Despite the barriers in a language that is as rough as the granite in the mountains, the ghosts of an undoubtedly essential myth suddenly appear, in the curve of a new path, because we have recognized them even before we met them”.

Restoration

The film was restored and digitized by Cinemateca Portuguesa - Museu do Cinema.