Journey to the Sun

After having walked the streets of Mellila, Malik, Mehdi, and Hassan now beat the cobblestones of Paris, discovering its lights and its chimeras, its joys and its violence...

Within one image, another one is always hiding. Wordless and using only archive footage, "Still Life" aims to rediscover and delve into the opacity of images (news, war footage, propaganda documentaries, photos of political prisoners and never seen before rushes) made during the 48 years (1926-1974) of Portuguese dictatorship in order to foster new interpretations.

Mingling identity photos taken by the Portuguese political police during the Salazar dictatorship and testimonies from the children of an assassinated communist activist, Luz Obscura invents a form that recreates as faithfully as possible the feeling of a family's broken identity.

In 1928, industrialist Henry Ford built a company town in the Brazilian jungle and established a rubber plantation. Within a few years his industrial utopia collapsed, coming to an end in 1945. Fordlândia was largely abandoned and became known as a ghost town.

One hundred years after Portugal joining World War One, the narrator starts a quest to know more about his great-grandfather Francisco Nobre, who fought in the trenches in France. A group photography, where no one seems able to identify his great-grandfather, serves as a starting point to find out who was this man no one seems to remember.

Fordlandia Malaise is a film about the memory and the present of Fordlandia, the company town founded by Henry Ford in the Amazon rain forest in 1928. His aim was to break the British rubber monopoly and produce this material in Brazil for his car production in the United States. Today, the remains of construction testify to the scale of the failure of this neocolonialist endeavor that lasted less than a decade. Nowadays, Fordlandia is a space suspended between times, between the 20th and 21st centuries, between utopia and dystopia, between visibility and invisibility: architectural buildings of steel, glass, and masonry still remain in use while traces of indigenous life left no marks on the ground.

My family emigrated to France in the 1960s, but soon after my mother was forced to return. Maybe that's why we moved house eight times and took refuge whenever possible in the village where the French family was on vacation. This restlessness has been in my dreams since then and never left them. It is through the images of these childhood dreams and places that I try to understand if there is a possible geography for someone with a story that seems to belong nowhere.—Jorge Vaz Gomes

Occupied Territories is the story of a plunder told by the people of the mountains of Caramulo. People speak of their life after the violent occupation and forestation of their community lands by the State in 1941. They speak of misery and emigration, of the ruptures and wounds imposed by the violent course of history, they tell of their resistance to this expropriation. They also have the memory of a time when communities were built in a collective perception of the territory that surrounded them.

In an isolated village of the Alentejo region, a conflict arises. José Vitorino, one of the landowners of the region, rich in prehistoric monuments, wants to build a luxurious solarium in lands filled with ancient rocks, places of devotion and sacred rituals. Indifferent to the people’s protest, who believe in the magical powers of the stones and that the region’s drought is due to the rocks’ destruction, José Vitorino hires an architect to plan his new house. On christmas eve, in the middle of the winter solstice, a strange ceremony around a dolmen, once an altar for bloody sacrifices in more remote times, releases a harmful spell. A race against time to reverse the faulty charm begins.

Chronicles of rural life, misadventures from the past century, fights one must win to muster misery and resistance against servitude and wage labor in the South of Portugal.