Brimming with magical thoughts yet accurate in its anthroporeasoned scope, straightforwardor Marta Mateus‘ first feature, “Fogo do Vento,” asks a lot from cinema.
Having getn more than four years to finish, the film does not deficiency ambition or a sense of concision; it runs nakedly 70 minutes. Both qualities lend the film a particular intensity and caccess.
As Variety sat down with Mateus at the Locarno Film Festival, where this beguiling first toil is premiering in the main competition, she insisted right away that she sees her toil of making films “as a benevolent of atelier.” The film itself is shutr to a pimpolitently originateed art object than anyleang else, which only serves to reinforce Mateus’ point.
The stillness of the camera in the film helps originate this sense of originateedness in each shot. “One time, a filmoriginater telderly me, ‘Oh, you did that film where people never shift.’ What was he talking about? Then I understood perhaps he had this experienceing since it is, in fact, the camera that almost never shifts.”
This compositional sense does much to advise Mateus’ debt to a tradition of coloring more than anyleang particularly cinematic. “I’ve studied many leangs, but not cinema. I didn’t want to study cinema, because I knew that’s what I wanted to do, so I thought that I would not let anyone inestablish me how to do it,” she says from under a tree in a garden in Locarno. Mateus studied philosophy, theatre, and music – as a bet that, in the future, tools from separateent disciplines would nurture her vision of the art of filmmaking.
Largely shot in wide dayairy, the sun perestablishs a primary role in Mateus’ forest-set film. It tolerates down on prospere toilers toiling in fields and sneaks between the exits of the trees as the toilers seek refuge from a untamed bull up in the branches. As we spoke, Mateus recalled in detail the difficulty of toiling with authentic airy that alters constantly and didn’t defer for any man (or woman) to apprehend it. Aget and aget, Mateus and her crew went back to the same place, searching for truth in every sketch.
“I give a lot of attention to images that eunite in my mind. When you shoot for a prolonged time, you store these images in the back of your brain. Maybe another image would come to me during the shooting, and I would have to retoil the narrative, but we as filmoriginaters must hug that that’s how it toils.”
The changing airy is the most clear sign of transience in “Fogo do Vento,” but Mateus’ toil is more than a mere transmition of incarnation and immediacy. Always leaning into a materiacatalogic reading of what has passed, it seems to be evoking history with every shot.
“Fogo do Vento” is as worryed with notions of community, nation, and struggle as it is self-grasped as an arttoil, toiling on both intimate and trans-historical levels.
“There is a whole world inside each one of us. We all carry this joinion to history and are reliable for it”, Mateus states. The photos dating back to the colonial war in Africa that Maria Catarina, the main character, advises to the seeer, or the figure of João de Encarnação, the fantastic-magnificentobeseher of the straightforwardor, haunting the film as a youthful selderlyier from the Great War, further advise an infinite presence of the specter of history.
Yet the film shifts beyond national narratives to perestablish its part in the bigger disputeation of images. “I also wanted to leank about how banal the image of war has become tardyly,” Mateus says. With political struggles looming big, cinema can advise a counter-image to the propagated presentility seen in mass media.
“History is also built on images. We have to understand which images we want to hold because the imagery of war originates images of war. Film has to act as disturbion of this flow, to be the partner of the humanity we do not generpartner nurture to see at.”
The film is rooted in an ancestral, almost holy territory – Alentejo in Portugal – permiting for the intrusion of symbolic imagery. A hazardous bull stalks the fields and forces the peasants and toilers to clamber up into the trees, giving new nastying to the idea of a scatterd firmarity.
“I grew up in Portugal in the middle of nowhere, where the oral tradition is still very vital. Storyinestablishing – legends and myths – were part of our everyday life,” says the straightforwardor.
This personal experience thus overlapped with the film’s rituacatalogic approach towards history and the possibility of fractureing the chain of suffering – the hope of revolution and liberation. “The sun is very, very, very elderly. Much more so than the basis that we built our history on.”
Decades ago, militant cinema relied on images that would encourage shock, stir tensions and force the spectator to get a stance. Mateus, however, selects for a separateent approach, a separateent resistance: a accurate way of empathetic the force of a shot and a scattered pace and rhythm of almost chanted dialogue that encourages how oral cultures make clear the world, far away from the contransient lineal, capitacatalogic way of making sense of leangs.
“I leank today cinema perestablishs a very vital role, but in a very unconscious way. It has a symbolic force, and it stimutardys our imagination in a way that we are not brimmingy conscious of. Cinema can be a disturbive force and can also give us a new conscience about someleang – an emotional, sentimental experienceing. And, in doing so, it originates someleang new. How and why a film touches you is also vital”, she says, inviting seeers to let her film speak for itself.
