The Mother and the Sea

A cameraman and a soundman arrive in Corvo in 2007, the smallest island in the archipelago of the Azores. Right in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, Corvo is a large rock, 6km high and 4km long, with the crater of a volcano and a single tiny village of 440 people. Gradually, this small filming crew is accepted by the island’s population as its new inhabitants, two people to add to a civilization almost 500 years old, whose history is hardly discernible, such is the lack of records and written memories. Shot at a vertiginous pace throughout a few years, self‐produced between arrivals, departures and coming‐backs, “It’s the Earth not the Moon” develops as the logbook of a ship, and turns out as a patchwork of discoveries and experiences, which follow the contemporary life of a civilization isolated in the middle of the sea. A long atlantic film‐odissey, divided in 14 chapters, that combines anthropological records, literature, lost archives, mythological and autobiographical stories.

"It's now seven months over my mother's death. I am facing the S. Miguel island sea, the family land in the Azores. Between the newborn babies, I found my Grandaunt, 91 years old, waiting for her moment to part. At night my family speaks to me of God and death. During the day we swim in the island's volcanic sea, where I meet Florence and Beru, a French couple that is crossing the Atlantic in the Balaou, a sailing boat. They invite me to come with them." Divided in three moments and eight lessons, Balaou is a voyage to accept the oblivion of things.