A Minha Juventude

Pedro occupies a bankrupt shopping center, where he lives haunted by his lack of future. The temporary stay of a new girl in the town is going to change his condition.

October 2019, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk (UK). Three months before Brexit. Hundreds of Portuguese migrant workers pour into town, seeking work at the local turkey factories. Tânia (The Mother of the Portuguese), a former worker in these poultry plants, is now married to an English hotel owner. She is the perfect facilitator for the Portuguese workers, but dreams of becoming a British citizen and leaving this dirty business behind by transforming her husband’s derelict hotels into refurbished senior citizens homes.

The panoramic shots are breathtaking: a majestic mountain landscape in winter, flat-roofed tin shacks cowering next to one other, women perched on steep slopes using primitive tools to break through pieces of rock. La Rinconada is situated over 5,000 meters high in the Peruvian Andes, on the edge of a gold mine. This 21st century El Dorado is an inhospitable place, where untold numbers of people live and work in the most precarious of conditions, hoping both for gold and a better life. Salomé Lamas has constructed a cinematic diptych to convey the extremity of this situation and the dimensions of its misery without having to resort to graphic images.

UM CORPO DE DANÇA is a proposal for the history of the body, showed through the path of the biggest Portuguese dance company of the 20th century. The documentary follows the rise of dance in Portugal along with the country’s political, economic and sociocultural ongoings as background. It is the story of a transforming body that frees itself from a fascist dictatorship, and of a changing society that opens itself to the world. From unreleased archive images and interviews with several creators and dancers, we follow the path of an extraordinary dance company through the movements and words of its protagonists, from creation in the early 1960s to its extinction in 2005.