Notes from an unfinished film. Is it easier to document documentarists or to chase after a sheep? To stare or to sleep? I learned with the sheep how to chew. Is it harder to search what to look for, or to find what you have seen? Escaping is one way, after an other. Serpa is still not that big anyway. Impossible, then. To escape after a look.

“We went to small farms without a story. Farmers – retired men, single, or humble couples – are often forgotten. This film is dedicated to the approach, our approach to these women and these inhabitants. We will go back several years in time, to accompany the evolution of these small farms in the middle of the hill slopes. Most of them are still working and living in their own farm, in many cases until the end of their lives. Young farmers with diplomas are looking for farms to explore; they are few, they want to live in these mountains.” – Raymond Depardon

Lozère, Ardèche and Haute-Loire are French regions mostly known for agricultural practice. Today, however, the region’s family farms are being converted into luxury country homes, while the country’s agricultural industry becoming monopolized by large conglomerates. In Profils Paysans: Le Quotidien, Raymond Depardon pays tribute to the farming men and women who in the face of changing times persist in maintaining a way of life that would otherwise be forgotten.

Considered as one of the poorest regions in Europe, Alentejo was once known as Portugal’s granary. Nowadays, despite some progress and signs of wealth, the immense plain is gradually becoming even more deserted. How do its inhabitants face the gradual lost of their identity? Men and women, former agricultural workers, recall the times of misery before the revolution when hunger, sun and poetry were all they had.

A set of documentaries shot in 8mm and video tape over 35 years, I Paisan is an invaluable record of the disappearing rural world filmed by someone who is apart of that world. Morandi, in an approach far removed from bucolic idealism and neorealism, pays homage to the peasants.

Encontros (Reencounters) tries to circumscribe a tribe made of sounds, music, poetry and humans; an analogical and outstanding tribe not belonging to any specific geographical known territory. Encontros forms a diptych with Polifonias, but it doesn’t intend to be a repetition or a follow up, though its characters and landscapes are similar, they are never the same. The film will cross different present and past gatherings between people and memories. Through these meetings, we will begin to wonder about what we are made of, and how memory, others and sharing make us richer.

“I was fourteen when we crossed the Euphrates on a raft-shaped ferry, together with my father and a furniture laden car. We had left my village to settle in Aleppo. I wanted to film the ferry, my home region, its people and its children, who where much like the kids my brother, my friends and myself had once been. I wanted to film what I held dear before it was swallowed up by the dam.” – Mohamad Al Roumi

The Three Gorges Dam, the largest ever built on earth, is under construction in China. It is expected to be completed in 2009. Until then, millions of local residents will have been relocated, because hundreds of towns and large areas of land will be under water — as well as countless natural monuments and historically important places in the Three Gorges area, including Fengjie, a town that gained fame as the hometown of Li Bai, one of the most important poets in Chinese history. Yan Mo documents the relocation of Fengjie in 2002, before the first stage of flooding took place — a move that greatly changed the lives of many people and caused them worry and strife.

How to teach children and teenagers to watch a film after the advent of television, video and computer games? How can we transmit to them, not the knowledge, but the intuition that a cinematic image is something else, when their daily visual practice has led them to be unamazed by images, editing and directing?

During six years we shot many hours of footage of Aldeia da Luz, a village in the south of Portugal condemned to disappear under the waters of the Alqueva dam. Bringing these images together with stories written by children in recollection of their feelings during the relocation process, this documentary ia a flashback into the strange story of Aldeia da Luz.

The sea is the place that holds the memory of the world. Through the cracks of the sea emerge the images from which a tale of a lost city is woven. A meditative and poetic film that offers, through an experimental approach, a new meaning to the sea, to memory and emotions.

Made entirely from archived images and without use of verbal language, Natureza Morta (Still Life) unveils images recorded during the 48 year long dictatorship in Portugal (newsreels, propaganda documentaries, photos of prisoners and images never included in a final cut), allowing for their reinterpretation.

“I went to Bosnia after the war ended, in 1996, when the Dayton Peace Accord was being implemented. Bosnia had been divided into two entities, which separated the two main opposing forces in the conflict: the Serb Bosnians and the Muslim Bosnians. Two years later, in 1998, I returned to Bosnia… This movie is a diary of these two journeys, in which I deal with the memories of the war, the death and the destruction, and with the struggle of those who survived and don’t know how to return home.” – Joaquim Sapinho

At present only fourteen inhabitants remain in the village of Aldealseñor, in Castilla, Spain. They are the last ones left from a generation of a people with over a thousand years of history in this place. For the moment being, life goes on. Very soon, but it will very soon come to an end. The villagers and the painter have something in common: the world is disappearing before their eyes. The director returns to her origins and witnesses this disappearance.

In the dark, the cry of a new-born baby breaks the silence of the countryside on a hot summer evening. After the hectic rush of birth, mother and son sleep soundly. Suddenly, and without anyone’s notice, a small red spot spreads on the baby’s white dress. The villagers are busy with their chores, children are playing games, and nature follows its unstoppable stream of life. Seated alone in the shadows of an attic, a boy draws the face of a watch on his left wrist. When he finishes, he puts it to his ear as if he could listen to the beat of the world around. Chronos, with its watchful eye, attempts to control life… but life drains away. Blood blooms across the baby´s clothes in an endless rose. The child in the attic erases the pretend watch. A firefly floats in the air – not now my son, not now…! The echo of history printed on the pages of a useless newspaper is fading away. As shadow descends again, we have a glimpse of the printed date – friday, June 28, 1940.

A train charges untill the… End. With his camera, Pelechian captures the faces of the passengers who travel from Erevan to Moscow. Something starts. A journey happens. Something ends.

In his first colour film, Pelechian captures the figure of a woman in a labour room.

Five is a five-part video that documents a stretch of the Caspian shoreline. Each section employs a different camera set-up to capture the activity on the beach: driftwood in the surf, passers, frolicking dogs, mischievous ducks and a nocturnal storm. Meditative, whimsical and in tune with nature’s paces and rhythms, the film unfolds so languorously that viewers are free to contemplate every detail. According to Kiarostami, his cinema is comparable to poetry because it demands concentration and consideration. Speaking about Five, he has said, “It is as if I recited a poem which had already been written. Everything already exists… I simply observe it”. Subtitled – Five Long Takes Dedicated to Yasujiro Ozu, Five stands as a demanding but transcendent work of minimalist art.

After what we identified as the cinema of the Father and of the Landscape, a cinema of Poetry, conqueror of realms (António Reis/Margarida Cordeiro), we sought out the two other points of the triangle, studying the metaphorical treatment of natural sets (Paulo Rocha) and the inclusion of the character in the set built d’après-nature (Pedro Costa). We found a cinema of the Inner Land and the Inner Self – as opposed to the official seafaring and conquering history – and we noticed the recurrent image of the river (river of blood, of gold, or as a natural border), in an approach to reality that tends to transform the vastness of the horizon into enclosed space.