FO[U]R VOID

There is a complex geo-human situation of isolation in Trás-os-Montes, a region in northeastern of Portugal. A used railroad bridge bought for only 22 villagers.

In this film there is a crescent count until the demystification of a bridge that connects and separates one country from another. Portugal and Spain, distant by fragments of their memories, images, objects, voices and ruins. Time runs out... An anxiety floats above the border and also a strength of believing that it is possible to change some things until the very last minute of our cross-over. In a world of contradictions, inequalities remain, existing surprising stories in almost forgotten lands. We are standing before a jigsaw puzzle organized into a map of ideas and memories.

Fallen to an aquatic world, they move ineffably in a dense, clear atmosphere as if it was their first autonomous moment.

Four distinct individuals — a filmmaker charting an autumnal trail of leaves, a mysterious girl wandering through the labyrinths of creation, a woman immersed in poignant reminiscences of autumns past, and a man devoted to nurturing the void left by a departed tree — converge in the multifaceted, polymorphic realm of Jorge Listopad (1921-2017), poet, essayist, teacher, mentor, theatre and television director, husband and father.

Every year, in the province with the highest rate of desertification in Portugal, thirteen villages of the border rejuvenate a bullfight with unique characteristics: the Capeia Arraiana. The butlers prepare they party and contribute to the ethnographic heritage, starting a ritual of emancipation where we can see confrontations with the force of the bull. Several men wear a rudimentary object made of wood, and fight the bulls that are brought in, often from Spain. The villages compete against each other in search of the Best Capeia of the Year.

Expression is a part of being human. Water is the source of an impossible life that rocks and consolidates the figure of a young woman.

We’ve accustomed, erroneously, to furiously fear our body’s fragility. This fragility which is so controversial to us to the point of inducing in ourselves the typical and contained movements, already tired. Once, twice. The same movements, the fears, the counted expirations, the subtracted bodies, the blind horizons. But the day comes when we understand that the fragility is precious and that the movement’s arrhytmia is safe. And we dance, accomplices in the differences of a shared fall.

Photographer-turned-radiologist José Fontes revisits the now-inactive psychiatric hospital where, for two weeks in 1968, he captured the complexities of everyday life in a series of harrowing photographs.