Rita Figueiredo

Laura Rossellini, a widow from Rome, vacations on the Algarve coast one hot summer. One day while sunbathing, she finds a wounded man named Robert drifting in the surf on a rubber raft. She takes him home, and, after he is revived, learns his story. As they talk, their mutual attraction grows, until a group of armed men suddenly arrive looking for Robert.

He was the most prolific within the New Portuguese Cinema generation. He would try western spaghetti, esoteric allegory, supernatural, and science-fiction. Without state subsidies, he would quit filmmaking in the 1990s. Who remembers António de Macedo?

Years before she saw a man being swallowed by a wave, inside a swimming pool. With this event, time ceased to be linear, and in a split second her family disappeared, leaving only behind the traces of their presence. Through the window´s reflex she realises her face has changed - the face is longer and the hair; she has memories inside her head, that she doesn´t recognize. In another time, she returns to that place to try to confirm her memory.

At the heart of a river, two guardians—reminiscent of the Moirai—conduct a ritual analysis of the water. Wielding mirrors that capture and reflect light, they seek to purify the river, only to realize that pollution does not dwell in the water itself, but within humanity itself. In a final gesture of enchantment and confrontation, they turn the mirrors towards the viewer, inviting them to confront their own reflection.

‘The Great Attractor’ is a film that derives from the myth of Icarus to explore the relationship between humans, their planet, its star, and their inherent destruction. Divided in three movements, the film brings together moving images that span from the 19th to the 21st century, secretly speaking about the relationship of cinema with light and the movement of human and celestial bodies.